NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity Leaves 'Tribulation'19 April 2017 (source: NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory)NASA's senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is departing "Cape Tribulation," a crater-rim segment it has explored since late 2014, southbound for its next destination, "Perseverance Valley."The rover team plans observations in the valley to determine what type of fluid activity carved it billions of years ago: water, wind, or flowing debris lubricated by water.A color panorama of a ridge called "Rocheport" provides both a parting souvenir of Cape Tribulation and also possible help for understanding the valley ahead. The view was assembled from multiple images taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera."The degree of erosion at Rocheport is fascinating," said Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis. "Grooves run perpendicular to the crest line. They may have been carved by water or ice or wind. We want to see as many features like this on the way to Perseverance Valley as we can, for comparison with what we find there."Perseverance Valley is about two football fields long. It cuts downward west to east across the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The crater is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter, with a segmented rim that exposes the oldest rocks ever investigated in place on Mars. Opportunity has less than four football fields' distance of driving to reach the top of the valley after departing Cape Tribulation, a raised segment about 3 miles (5 kilometers) long on the crater's western rim.In 68 months since reaching Endeavour Crater, Opportunity has explored "Cape York," "Solander Point" and "Murray Ridge" before reaching Cape Tribulation about 30 months ago. "Cape Byron," the next raised segment to the south, contains Perseverance Valley and is separated from Tribulation by a gap of flatter ground.Five drives totaling about 320 feet (98 meters) since the beginning of April have brought Opportunity to a boundary area where Cape Tribulation meets the plain surrounding the crater.Cape Tribulation has been the site of significant events in the mission. There, in 2015, Opportunity surpassed a marathon-race distance of total driving since its 2004 landing on Mars. It climbed to the highest-elevation viewpoint it has reached on Endeavour's rim. In a region of Tribulation called "Marathon Valley," it investigated outcrops containing clay minerals that had been detected from orbit. There were some name-appropriate Tribulation experiences, as well. The rover team has coped with loss of reliability in Opportunity's non-volatile "flash" memory since 2015. With flash memory unavailable, each day's observations are lost if not radioed homeward the same day."From the Cape Tribulation departure point, we'll make a beeline to the head of Perseverance Valley, then turn left and drive down the full length of the valley, if we can," Arvidson said. "It's what you would do if you were an astronaut arriving at a feature like this: Start at the top, looking at the source material, then proceed down the valley, looking at deposits along the way and at the bottom."Clues to how the valley was carved could come from the arrangement of different sizes of rocks and gravel in the deposits.He said, "If it was a debris flow, initiated by a little water, with lots of rocks moving downhill, it should be a jumbled mess. If it was a river cutting a channel, we may see gravel bars, crossbedding, and what's call a 'fining upward' pattern of sediments, with coarsest rocks at the bottom." Another pattern that could be evidence of flowing water would be if elongated pieces of gravel in a deposited bed tend to be stacked leaning in the same direction, providing a record of the downstream flow direction.Now more than 13 years into a mission originally scheduled to last three months on Mars, Opportunity remains unexpectedly capable of continued exploration. It has driven about four-tenths of a mile (two-thirds of a kilometer) since the start of 2017, bringing the total traverse so far to 27.6 miles (44.4 kilometers). The current season on Mars is past the period when global dust storms might arise and curtail Opportunity's solar power.Opportunity and the next-generation Mars rover, Curiosity, as well as three active NASA Mars orbiters, and surface missions to launch in 2018 and 2020 are all part of a legacy of robotic exploration which is helping to lay the groundwork for sending humans there in the 2030s. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, built Opportunity and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more information about Opportunity, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/rovershttp://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov
Martian desert on the horizonA grooved ridge called "Rocheport" on the rim of Mars' Endeavour Crater spans this scene from the Pancam on NASA's Mars rover Opportunity. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.
This image shows segments of the western rim of Mars' Endeavour Crater. NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has explored parts of the rim since 2011. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Mike Seibert @mikeseibertReplying to @PlanetaryKeri @avatasticThanks to the skill of our power subsystem engineers and careful use, Opportunity's batteries have thousands more sols of lifetime remaining
Approximate true-color panorama mosaic from @NASAJPL's Opportunity rover on April 21, 2017 (Sol 4707). Note the rover's tracks up the ridge.
Wow wow wow. This is one of those times in hindsight it seems amazing that we pulled off that descent
NASA has released the first high-resolution aerial color image of the Opportunity rover’s landing site on a sprawling Martian plain, where the airbag-cushioned robot fortuitously rolled into a Eagle Crater in January 2004, putting its scientific instruments face-to-face with a block of sedimentary rock that gave ground teams confirmation Mars was once a warmer, wetter, and habitable planet.
You should think it would make sense to build quite a few more of those rovers, with just a few basic updates to solar cells, batteries and cameras, and plop them down on various locations on Mars. I cannot think it will ever be possible to make a more economical design (in view of the amazing longevity of Opportunity and to a slightly lesser extent Spirit).
Mike Seibert is the Lead Spacecraft Systems Engineer for the Mars rovers:Quote Mike Seibert @mikeseibertReplying to @PlanetaryKeri @avatasticThanks to the skill of our power subsystem engineers and careful use, Opportunity's batteries have thousands more sols of lifetime remaininghttps://twitter.com/mikeseibert/status/855925314060517377
I think you identify two issues: 1-the advance of technology, and 2-hindsight. Certainly our technology is better today. It has been almost 20 years since much of that design was locked down. But as you note, getting something into the field exposes its strengths and limitations. You can figure out how to do things better.Take the discussion in a different direction: assuming a clean-sheet rover design designed to be cheaper, could you perform valuable science with it for the cost, especially in larger numbers of rovers? Certainly you could perform valuable science, because every new place you land and explore is new, and therefore useful. But the science community is interested in answering some bigger questions, not simply adding data points.
“The walkabout is designed to look at what’s just above Perseverance Valley,” said Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis. “We see a pattern of striations running east-west outside the crest of the rim.”A portion of the crest at the top of Perseverance Valley has a broad notch. Just west of that, elongated patches of rocks line the sides of a slightly depressed, east-west swath of ground, which might have been a drainage channel billions of years ago.“We want to determine whether these are in-place rocks or transported rocks,” Arvidson said. “One possibility is that this site was the end of a catchment where a lake was perched against the outside of the crater rim. A flood might have brought in the rocks, breached the rim and overflowed into the crater, carving the valley down the inner side of the rim. Another possibility is that the area was fractured by the impact that created Endeavour Crater, then rock dikes filled the fractures, and we’re seeing effects of wind erosion on those filled fractures.”In the hypothesis of a perched lake, the notch in the crest just above Perseverance Valley may have been a spillway. Weighing against that hypothesis is an observation that the ground west of the crest slopes away, not toward the crater. The science team is considering possible explanations for how the slope might have changed.A variation of the impact-fracture hypothesis is that water rising from underground could have favored the fractures as paths to the surface and contributed to weathering of the fracture-filling rocks.Close examination of the rock piles along the edges of the possible channel might help researchers evaluate these and other possible histories of the site. Meanwhile, the team is analyzing stereo images of Perseverance Valley, taken from the rim, to plot Opportunity’s route. The valley extends down from the crest into the crater at a slope of about 15 to 17 degrees for a distance of about two football fields.
Quote from: Blackstar on 05/16/2017 12:45 pmI think you identify two issues: 1-the advance of technology, and 2-hindsight. Certainly our technology is better today. It has been almost 20 years since much of that design was locked down. But as you note, getting something into the field exposes its strengths and limitations. You can figure out how to do things better.Take the discussion in a different direction: assuming a clean-sheet rover design designed to be cheaper, could you perform valuable science with it for the cost, especially in larger numbers of rovers? Certainly you could perform valuable science, because every new place you land and explore is new, and therefore useful. But the science community is interested in answering some bigger questions, not simply adding data points.It's often the data from new places that enables you to answer the bigger questions. Plus giving the contextural knowledge than enable to to know what are the bigger questions to ask.
Quote from: Dalhousie on 05/26/2017 10:51 pmQuote from: Blackstar on 05/16/2017 12:45 pmI think you identify two issues: 1-the advance of technology, and 2-hindsight. Certainly our technology is better today. It has been almost 20 years since much of that design was locked down. But as you note, getting something into the field exposes its strengths and limitations. You can figure out how to do things better.Take the discussion in a different direction: assuming a clean-sheet rover design designed to be cheaper, could you perform valuable science with it for the cost, especially in larger numbers of rovers? Certainly you could perform valuable science, because every new place you land and explore is new, and therefore useful. But the science community is interested in answering some bigger questions, not simply adding data points.It's often the data from new places that enables you to answer the bigger questions. Plus giving the contextural knowledge than enable to to know what are the bigger questions to ask. [I missed this back when it was posted]The Mars community has spoken on this and they've been pretty clear. There is not much disagreement over their goals.
Opportunity will begin the 5,000th Martian day of it's 90 day mission this afternoon. JPLs original estimate of MER lifetimes. They figured as high as 136 days in one location.https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/11979/02-0732.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
The features looked very similar to formations found on volcanic slopes in Hawaii, according to the space agency.