[meteorite-list] NASA Long-Lived Mars Opportunity Rover Passes 25 Miles of Driving

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-245  

NASA Long-Lived Mars Opportunity Rover Passes 25 Miles of Driving
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
July 28, 2014

NASA's Opportunity Mars rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2004,
now holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 25 miles
(40 kilometers) of driving. The previous record was held by the Soviet
Union's Lunokhod 2 rover.

"Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on
another world," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas,
of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "This is so
remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one
kilometer and was never designed for distance. But what is really
important is not how many miles the rover has racked up, but how much
exploration and discovery we have accomplished over that distance."

A drive of 157 feet (48 meters) on July 27 put Opportunity's total
odometry at 25.01 miles (40.25 kilometers). This month's driving brought
the rover southward along the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The rover
had driven more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) before arriving at
Endeavour Crater in 2011, where it has examined outcrops on the crater's
rim containing clay and sulfate-bearing minerals. The sites are yielding
evidence of ancient environments with less acidic water than those
examined at Opportunity's landing site.

If the rover can continue to operate the distance of a marathon -- 26.2
miles (about 42.2 kilometers) -- it will approach the next major
investigation site mission scientists have dubbed "Marathon Valley."
Observations from spacecraft orbiting Mars suggest several clay minerals
are exposed close together at this valley site, surrounded by steep
slopes where the relationships among different layers may be evident.

The Russian Lunokhod 2 rover, a successor to the first Lunokhod mission
in 1970, landed on Earth's moon on Jan. 15, 1973, where it drove about
24.2 miles (39 kilometers) in less than five months, according to
calculations recently made using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter (LRO) cameras that reveal Lunokhod 2's tracks.

Irina Karachevtseva at Moscow State University of Geodesy and
Cartography's Extraterrestrial Laboratory in Russia, Brad Jolliff of
Washington University in St. Louis, Tim Parker of JPL, and others
collaborated to verify the map-based methods for computing distances are
comparable for Lunokhod-2 and Opportunity.

"The Lunokhod missions still stand as two signature accomplishments of
what I think of as the first golden age of planetary exploration, the
1960s and '70s," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New
York, and principal investigator for NASA's twin Mars rovers,
Opportunity and Spirit. "We're in a second golden age now, and what
we've tried to do on Mars with Spirit and Opportunity has been very much
inspired by the accomplishments of the Lunokhod team on the moon so many
years ago. It has been a real honor to follow in their historical wheel
tracks."

As Opportunity neared the mileage record earlier this year, the rover
team chose the name Lunokhod 2 for a crater about 20 feet (6 meters) in
diameter on the outer slope of Endeavour's rim on Mars.

The Mars Exploration Rover Project is one element of NASA's ongoing and
future Mars missions preparing for a human mission to the planet in the
2030s. JPL manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland,
manages LRO for the Science Mission Directorate.

For more information about NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity,
visit these sites:

http://www.nasa.gov/rovers

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov
<http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/home/index.html>

Follow the project on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/MarsRovers

On Facebook, visit:

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

An image of Lunokhod 2's tracks, as imaged by NASA's LRO, is available
online at:

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/774

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

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

2014-245