NASA rover Opportunity begins 10th year on Mars

[Kingfish]

Posted today: 1/24/2013 12:35:48 PM ET - NASA rover Opportunity begins 10th year on Mars

The older, smaller cousin of NASA's huge Mars rover Curiosity is quietly celebrating a big milestone Thursday — nine years on the surface of the Red Planet.

NASA's Opportunity rover landed on Mars the night of Jan. 24, 2004 PST (just after midnight EST on Jan. 25), three weeks after its twin, Spirit, touched down. Spirit stopped operating in 2010, but Opportunity is still going strong, helping scientists better understand the Red Planet's wetter, warmer past.

"No one could've imagined how good the exploration and scientific discovery would be for this vehicle, looking from the perspective of nine years ago," said John Callas, Opportunity's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's been a phenomenal accomplishment."

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The rovers rolled far beyond their 90-day warranties. Spirit finally stopped communicating with Earth in March 2010, after getting mired in soft sand and failing to maneuver into a position that would allow it to slant its solar panels toward the sun over the 2009-2010 Martian winter. NASA declared the rover dead in 2011.

But Opportunity keeps chugging along. It has put 22.03 miles (35.46 kilometers) on its odometer since landing on Mars — just 1 mile (1.6 km) off the all-time record for most ground covered on the surface of another world. The Soviet Union's unmanned Lunokhod 2 rover holds that mark, traveling 23 miles (37 km) on the moon back in 1973.

According to the embedded video, NASA hopes to set a Marathon distance record with Opportunity. I don't have the information on Curiosity's distance to date, though certainly I'd expect it's going to beat Opportunity by a large wide margin. Still - these EVs are something else; really remarkable engineering feats!

~KF

 

[USAEBIKECO]

The rover is really remarkable. Thats what NASA should focus on in the future. Sending out rovers and searching for killer asteroids.

Leave the manned space exporation to Elon Musk and SpaceX.

 

[steelmesh]

If we could only get one of those radioactive thermoelectric batteries =)