[meteorite-list] MRO Provides Travel Tips for Mars Opportunity Rover

[Ron Baalke]

Dec. 16, 2010

Dwayne Brown      
Headquarters, Washington 
202-358-1726 
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov 

Guy Webster 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 
818-354-6278 
guy.webster at jpl.nasa.gov 

Rachel Hoover 
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. 
650-604-0643 
rachel.hoover at nasa.gov   


RELEASE: 10-342

NASA SPACECRAFT PROVIDES TRAVEL TIPS FOR MARS ROVER

SAN FRANCISCO -- NASA's Mars Opportunity rover is getting important 
tips from an orbiting spacecraft as it explores areas that might hold 
clues about past Martian environments. 

Researchers are using a mineral-mapping instrument aboard NASA's Mars 
Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to help the rover investigate a large 
ancient crater called Endeavour. MRO's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging 
Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) is providing maps of minerals at 
Endeavour's rim that are helping the team choose which area to 
explore first and where to go from there. 

As MRO orbits more than 150 miles high, the CRISM instrument provides 
mapping information for mineral exposures on the surface as small as 
a tennis court. 

"This is the first time mineral detections from orbit are being used 
in tactical decisions about where to drive on Mars," said Ray 
Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis. Arvidson is the 
deputy principal investigator for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers 
and a co-investigator for CRISM. 

Opportunity's science team chose to begin driving the rover toward the 
14-mile-wide crater in 2008, after four years studying other sites in 
what initially was planned as a three-month mission. The rover has 
traveled approximately nine miles since setting out for Endeavour 
crater. It will take several months to reach it. 

The team plans for Opportunity's exploration of Endeavour to begin at 
a rim fragment called Cape York. That feature is too low to be 
visible by the rover, but appears from orbit to be nearly surrounded 
by water-bearing minerals. The planned route then turns southward 
toward a higher rim fragment called Cape Tribulation, where CRISM has 
detected a class of clay minerals not investigated yet by a ground 
mission. 
Spacecraft orbiting Mars found these minerals to be widespread on the 
planet. The presence of clay minerals at Endeavour suggests an 
earlier and milder wet environment than the very acidic wet one 
indicated by previous evidence found by Opportunity. 

"We used to have a disconnect between the scale of identifying 
minerals from orbit and what missions on the surface could examine," 
said CRISM team member Janice Bishop of NASA's Ames Research Center 
in Moffett Field, Calif., and the SETI Institute of Mountain View, 
Calif. Now, rovers are driving farther and orbital footprints are 
getting smaller." 

Ten years ago, an imaging spectrometer on the Mars Global Surveyor 
orbiter found an Oklahoma-sized are with a type of the mineral 
hematite exposed. This discovery motivated selection of the area as 
Opportunity's 2004 landing site. Each pixel footprint for that 
spectrometer was two miles across. CRISM resolves areas about 60 feet 
across. Last fall, the instrument began using a pixel-overlap 
technique that provided even better resolution. 

Opportunity has just reached a 90-meter-diameter (300-foot-diameter) 
crater called Santa Maria where CRISM detected a patch of ground with 
indications of water bound into the mineral. Opportunity will conduct 
a science campaign at the crater for the next several weeks to 
compare the ground results to the orbital indications. 

A Martian year lasts approximately 23 months. During the past Martian 
year, Opportunity covered more than 7.5 miles of the mission's 16 
total miles traveled since it landed in January 2004. The rover has 
returned more than 141,000 images. 

MRO reached the Red Planet in 2006 to begin a two-year primary science 
mission. Its data show Mars had diverse wet environments at many 
locations for differing durations during the planet's history, and 
climate-change cycles persist into the present era. The mission has 
returned more planetary data than all other Mars missions combined. 

JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rovers and the Mars Reconnaissance 
Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The 
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., 
manages CRISM. 

For more information about Mars missions, visit: 

http://www.nasa.gov/mars   
	
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