• Tag Archives Opportunity

  • Nasa says Mars mystery rock that ‘appeared’ from nowhere is ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Squyres said his team had two theories on how the rock got there – that there’s “a smoking hole in the ground somewhere nearby” and it was caused by a meteor, or that it was “somehow flicked out of the ground by a wheel” as the rover went by.

    “We had driven a metre or two away from here, and I think the idea that somehow we mysteriously flicked it with a wheel is the best explanation,” Squyres said.

    Yet the story got even stranger when Opportunity investigated further. Squyres explained: “We are as we speak situated with the rover’s instruments deployed making measurements of this rock.

    “We’ve taken pictures of both the doughnut and jelly parts, and the got the first data on the composition of the jelly yesterday.

    “It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” he said. “It’s very high in sulphur, it’s very high in magnesium, it’s got twice as much manganese as we’ve ever seen in anything on Mars.

    “I don’t know what any of this means. We’re completely confused, and everyone in the team is arguing and fighting (over what it means).

    “That’s the beauty of this mission… what I’ve realised is that we will never be finished. There will always be something tantalising, something wonderful just beyond our reach that we didn’t quite get to – and that’s the nature of exploration.”

    Squyres was speaking at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the arrival of Opportunity and Spirit on the surface of Mars.

    While Spirit lost contact with Earth and was later declared “dead” in 2010, Opportunity has now roamed the planet far in excess of what was originally planned as a three-month mission. Nasa said that with its maximum speed of just 0.05mph, as of “Sol 3547” (15 January 2014) Opportunity had covered just over 24 miles (38km).

    Full article: http://www.independe … -before-9070323.html


    📂This entry was posted in Space 📎and tagged

  • Mars Rover Opportunity Slips Into Standby Mode, NASA Says

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    NASA’s long-lived Opportunity Mars rover has gone into a self-imposed standby mode on the Red Planet, the robot’s handlers say.

    Mission controllers for Opportunity, which landed on Mars in January 2004, first learned of the issue on Saturday (April 27). On that day, the rover got back in touch after a nearly three-week communication moratorium caused by an unfavorable planetary alignment called a Mars solar conjunction, in which Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun.

    The Opportunity rover apparently put itself into standby on April 22 after sensing a problem during a routine camera check, mission managers said.

    “Our current suspicion is that Opportunity rebooted its flight software, possibly while the cameras on the mast were imaging the sun,” Opportunity project manager John Callas, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., explained in a statement Monday (April 29).

    “We found the rover in a standby state called automode, in which it maintains power balance and communication schedules, but waits for instructions from the ground,” Callas added. “We crafted our solar conjunction plan to be resilient to this kind of rover reset, if it were to occur.”

    Opportunity’s handlers prepared new commands Monday designed to spur the rover into resuming operations, mission team members said.

    The golf-cart-size Opportunity landed on Mars more than nine years ago along with its twin, Spirit, on a three-month mission to search for signs of past water activity on the Red Planet. The two rovers found plenty of such evidence, and then kept trundling across Mars. Spirit was declared dead in 2010, but Opportunity is still going strong.

    Full article: http://www.space.com … de.html?cmpid=514630


    📂This entry was posted in Space 📎and tagged