[meteorite-list] Opportunity Rover's 7th Mars Winter to Include New Study Area

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4651

Opportunity Rover's 7th Mars Winter to Include New Study Area
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
July 6, 2016

Fast Facts:

* Scientists and engineers plan to use NASA's Mars rover Opportunity throughout 
the upcoming Martian winter to examine exposures of clay minerals.

* First, the rover is studying a band of reddish material at the edge 
of "Spirit of St. Louis Crater."

Operators of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity plan to drive the 
rover into a valley this month where Opportunity will be active through 
the long-lived rover's seventh Martian winter, examining outcrops that 
contain clay minerals.

Opportunity resumed driving on June 27 after about three weeks of reduced 
activity around Mars solar conjuntion, when the sun's position between 
Earth and Mars disrupts communication. The rover is operating in a mode 
that does not store any science data overnight. It transmits the data 
the same day they're collected.

The rover is working about half a football field's length away from entering 
the western end of "Marathon Valley," a notch in the raised rim of Endeavour 
Crater, which is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. Opportunity 
landed on Mars in 2004 and has been studying the rim of Endeavour since 
2011.

Engineers and scientists operating Opportunity have chosen Marathon Valley 
as the location for the solar-powered rover to spend several months, starting 
in August, to take advantage of a sun-facing slope loaded with potential 
science targets.

Marathon Valley stretches about three football fields long, aligned generally 
east-west. Observations of the valley using the Compact Reconnaissance 
Imaging Spectrometer for Mars aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter 
have detected exposures of clay minerals holding evidence about ancient 
wet environmental conditions. Researchers plan to use Opportunity to investigate 
relationships among these clay-bearing deposits.

The team plans to drive Opportunity this month to sites on the valley's 
northern side, where the slope faces south. Right now, it is early autumn 
in the southern hemisphere of Mars. The shortest day of the hemisphere's 
winter won't come until January. As the sun's daily track across the northern 
sky gets shorter, the north-facing slope on the southern side of the valley 
will offer the advantage of tilting the rover's solar panels toward the 
sun, to boost the amount of electrical energy production each day.

First, though, the mission's initial activities for a few days after emerging 
from the solar conjunction period are to examine rocks in and near a band 
of reddish material at the northern edge of an elongated crater called 
"Spirit of St. Louis." During the driving moratorium, the rover used the 
alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on the end of its robotic arm to assess 
the chemical composition of a target in this red zone.

The rover is operating in a mode that avoids use of the type of onboard 
memory -- non-volatile flash memory -- that can retain data even when 
power is turned off overnight. It is using random-access memory, which 
retains data while power is on. The rover operated productively in this 
mode for several months in 2014. A reformatting of the flash memory earlier 
this year temporarily slowed the frequency of flash-induced computer resets, 
but the reset occurrences increased again later in the spring.

"Opportunity can continue to accomplish science goals in this mode," said 
Opportunity Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 
Pasadena, California. "Each day we transmit data that we collect that 
day."

"Flash memory is a convenience but not a necessity for the rover," Callas 
said. "It's like a refrigerator that way. Without it, you couldn't save 
any leftovers. Any food you prepare that day you would have to either 
eat or throw out. Without using flash memory, Opportunty needs to send 
home the high-priority data the same day it collects it, and lose any 
lower-priority data that can't fit into the transmission."

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project landed twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity 
on Mars in 2004 to begin missions planned to last three months. Both rovers 
far exceeded those plans. Spirit worked for six years, and Opportunity 
is still active. Findings about ancient wet environments on Mars have 
come from both rovers. The project is one element of NASA's ongoing and 
future Mars missions preparing for a human mission to the planet in the 
2030s. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages 
the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about Opportunity, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/rovers

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov

Follow the project on Twitter and Facebook at:

http://twitter.com/MarsRovers

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


Media Contact

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 

2015-228