[meteorite-list] NASA Mars Exploration Rover Team to be Honored

[Ron Baalke]

Sept. 7, 2012

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 

RELEASE: 12-313

NASA MARS EXPLORATION ROVER TEAM TO BE HONORED

PASADENA, Calif. -- The mission team for NASA's long-lived Mars 
Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity will be awarded the Haley 
Space Flight Award. The team will receive the award Sept. 12 during 
the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Space 
2012 Conference and Exposition in Pasadena, Calif. 

The award is presented for outstanding contributions by an astronaut 
or flight test personnel to the advancement of the art, science or 
technology of astronautics. Past recipients include Alan Shepherd, 
John Glenn, Thomas Stafford, Robert Crippen, Kathryn Sullivan and the 
crew of space shuttle mission STS-125, which flew in 2009 on the last 
shuttle mission to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. 

The award citation praises this project's "new techniques in 
extraterrestrial robotic system operations to explore another world 
and extend mission lifetime." Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager 
John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, 
will accept the award for the team. 

"On behalf of the many hundreds of scientists and engineers who 
designed, built and operate these rovers, it is a great honor to 
accept this most prestigious award," Callas said. "It is especially 
gratifying that this comes right as Opportunity is conducting one of 
the most significant campaigns in the eight-and-a-half years since 
landing. We still are going strong, with perhaps the most exciting 
exploration still ahead." 

In its eighth year operating on Mars, Opportunity is surveying a 
crater-rim outcrop of layered rock in search of clay minerals that 
could provide new information about a formerly wet environment. 
Spirit worked for more than six years -- until 2010 -- 24 times 
longer than its original three-month prime mission. 

In just the past two months, Opportunity has driven about a third of a 
mile (more than 525 meters), extending its total overland travel 
distance to 21.76 miles (35 kilometers). Recent drives along the 
inner edge of the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour 
Crater have brought the rover close to a layered outcrop in an area 
where clay minerals have been detected from orbit. These minerals 
could offer evidence of ancient, wet conditions with less acidity 
than the ancient, wet environments recorded at sites Opportunity 
visited during its first seven years on Mars. 

Opportunity's position overlooking 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) 
Endeavour Crater is about 5,200 miles (8,400 kilometers) from where 
Curiosity, NASA's next-generation Mars rover, landed inside Gale 
Crater a month ago. 

JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science 
Mission Directorate in Washington. 

For more information about Opportunity and Spirit, visit 

http://www.nasa.gov/rovers 

and 

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov 

You can follow the project on Twitter and on Facebook at: 

http://twitter.com/MarsRovers 

and 

http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers 

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