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Opportunity Rover Arrives at Endurance Crater

Posted by simoniker on from the enduring-opportunities dept.

Mean_Nishka writes "After weeks of driving, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has arrived at 'Endurance Crater.' It's a scientific treasure trove with an extensive outcrop of layered bedrock, and scientists will have to decide whether or not to send Opportunity inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever - there's more information via a Monterey Herald/AP article."

25 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. And? by Black_Logic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    NASA sent the twin rovers to Mars to prospect for geologic evidence of past water on the now dry and dusty planet. Sooo... Did they find any?! Did the article writer not know, or was it not considered interesting enough to print. :)

    On a side note, I don't understand the design of these rovers. Seems like they're dangerously flippable. If that happens, they're pretty much junk, right? Do they have any way of correcting themselves if one tread climbs up onto a rock and it tips over? Why not have 5 or 6 treads around the center and have the middle gyroscopiclly right itself?

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    1. Re:And? by Black_Logic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My understanding was that this article was about the specific crater, Endurance. From the line you pointed out to me, "Opportunity revealed the Eagle crater outcrop formed in water; they now want to know if that was the case for the deeper - and thus older - rocks in Endurance." it's seems as though knowing whether other rocks, such as the ones in the endurance crater were formed similarly. So, my question was, do they not know yet? They've got images, are they only preliminary images? Do they take time to analyze?

      --
      Ansi's and stupid tricks!
    2. Re:And? by cedmond · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One of the posts here already pointed out that the rovers are programmed to stop if they think they will flip. I think I remember this actually happening with the Sojourner rover and the drivers had to back it away before programming the new instructions.

      I would imagine one of the reasons the rovers sit so high is ground clearance. It would be pretty inefficient to drive around every rock that was an inch high instead of going right over it.

      Also, the wheels all sort of move up and down independently keeping the center relatively level. Tank-like treads would tip the entire side of the rover as they rolled over something.

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    3. Re:And? by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Opportunity revealed the Eagle crater outcrop formed in water; they now want to know if that was the case for the deeper - and thus older - rocks in Endurance." it's seems as though knowing whether other rocks, such as the ones in the endurance crater were formed similarly. So, my question was, do they not know yet? They've got images, are they only preliminary images?

      The conclusions from the first crater (Eagle) were mostly based on close-up images (AKA "microscope"), and "hands-on" spectrometer analysis. I don't think too many conclusions can be made from a distance. They would probably have to go into the crater and "poke around", and that is the big question. There is a possibility that the rover may never be able to get out or tip over. Thus, they have a scientific gamble to weigh.

      I suspect they will go for it because of the extra layers not seen elsewhere. Plus, since the formal "primary" mission is over, an accidental loss would not be too much egg-on-face. They can take bigger gambles now.

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  2. They've been there since Friday by micha2305 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, they've been sitting there since Friday and will spent the next two sols (Martian days) looking at the crater. Here's an amazing hi-res TIF. If you ask me, it looks to steep to go down. But on the other hand, this is the most exciting target in the Meridiani plains...

  3. Spirit and the Columbia Hills by dolphin558 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am really looking forward to when Spirit reaches the Columbia Hills. If Spirit successfully reaches the top of the hill the view will be breathtaking. Not only could we see the landing site but also see the actual rim of Gusev Crater more clearly. It will be an amazing sight!

    1. Re:Spirit and the Columbia Hills by ScottMaxwell · · Score: 5, Interesting
      I am really looking forward to when Spirit reaches the Columbia Hills. If Spirit successfully reaches the top of the hill the view will be breathtaking. Not only could we see the landing site but also see the actual rim of Gusev Crater more clearly. It will be an amazing sight!

      I'd like to see that, too. But unfortunately, the current thinking is that we won't be climbing the hills when we get there.

      In fact, I just had that conversation with Larry Soderbloom, one of the top scientists on the mission. My side was, basically: "But, Larry, the view would be so cool." :-) He readily agreed, but unfortunately, there's just nothing scientifically compelling up there. (As best we can tell from orbital imagery, that is.)

      However, MOC images (MOC is the camera system on the MGS spacecraft) show that there's a lot of cool stuff in the hills' vicinity, making them a worthwhile destination anyway. There are rock outcroppings on the hills themselves, which we'll be able to see fairly well even without climbing to them, and several geological features of great interest in the 500m or so around the hills. (Now that we've upgraded the rovers' flight software, we're regularly covering 70m+ per sol -- indeed, we just set a new Spirit single-sol record of 92m -- so 500m is roughly a week of driving.) As a result, that area is likely to give us our best chance of telling the "water story" we came to Gusev to find.

      Incidentally, we're shooting for reaching the hills in about 40 more days (we're targeting sol 160; we just planned sol 119). Stay tuned.

      FWIW, as spectacular as the view would be in other respects, I don't think the Gusev Crater rim would look any better from the top of the hills. It's faint because of the high tau (atmospheric opacity) caused by the global dust storm that preceded our landing, and which is still settling. Maybe the view would be better from a little higher, but I doubt it. The good news is that the rim is showing up better and better as the atmosphere clears, so we'll get better views of it over time even without climbing the hills. (If you've never noticed the rim in the images, you can see it in this image if you look carefully -- look to the right of the hills, at the right-hand edge of the image. It's faint, but that's the rim of Gusev Crater.)

      --

      ``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
  4. Nice MER Animation by boomgopher · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not sure if this has been posted before, but I stumbled on this today, it's quite amazing:

    Mars Exploration Rover
    (requires Quicktime, me thinks)

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  5. Re:Stuck there forever? by anubi · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Somehow, if we get all the way over there and fail to avail ourselves of the opportunity to see this, it kinda seems like traveling all the way to California to see Disneyland, then stopping at the ticket gate.

    The rovers have a limited lifetime.

    I leave it to the scientists to see this from their chair. They drove more than they expected, past the "warranty" of the rover, to get there. From now on, all is gravy. From their vantage points, they can figure out if there is anything even remotely around which would make it not worth the risk. You gotta die sometime. Might as well be doing something useful.

    These ships were not made to stay in the harbor.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]

  6. Forever, or until the solar panels die... by beeplet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder what the expected lifetime of the Opportunity rover is now? If they are not expecting it to hold up much longer anyway, I don't see any reason not to send it down into the crater to investigate for as long as it can. Are there other interesting sites within its expected range?

    1. Re:Forever, or until the solar panels die... by beeplet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      True. I probably should have been clearer, but I meant to ask whether NASA has any kind of updated estimate of how much life is left in the rover, given that it hasn't kicked the bucket yet. From what I understand the only hard limit on the lifetime is that the solar panels' output decreases as they accumulate dust, but I'm sure there are other contributing factors as well...

    2. Re:Forever, or until the solar panels die... by ColaMan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You could always just (as I presume they will) slowly restrict operations as effeciencies wear down. (Nah, stay here today, charge batteries for a trip tomorrow)

      Surely at *some* point the dust deposition on your panels would balance out to the amount of dust being blown off them - whether it's at some useful percentage remains to be seen I guess.

      When it gets real tough they could always turn it into a permanent station - just park up in an interesting (preferably high-ish) spot, change your firmware to boot up once a day and send an "I'm Still Here! Temp -30degC Pressure 6mbar location..... as before" message.... once a week or at local noon try and squeeze enough juice into (and out of) your fruited batteries to take a photo.

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  7. Lomg time. by OgGreeb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "...decide whether or not to send Opportunity inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever"

    Whether it is sent into the crater or remains outside and nearby, what is the likelihood that the rovers will *ever* be recovered? Won't they then be "stuck forever" anyway? Also, they just sent the rover to this place over many days. If this wasn't the best place to get stuck, why did they bother?

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    1. Re:Lomg time. by Gogo+Dodo · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Whether it is sent into the crater or remains outside and nearby, what is the likelihood that the rovers will *ever* be recovered? Won't they then be "stuck forever" anyway?

      One would hope that eventually somebody will recover Pathfinder/Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity. Heck, maybe one day somebody will find the remnants of Beagle 2 and figure out just what happened.

      The idea isn't unprecedented. Apollo 12 landed at the Surveyor III landing site. They didn't pick it up, but I supposed they could have brought back parts of it.

  8. Re:Don't jump to conclusions... by beckerie · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It could very easily get stuck there. When the rover was leaving the crater that it landed in, they had a little bit of trouble because of soil slippage, and the crater wasn't all that steep.
    Considering the terrain of the red planet, NASA surely would have incorporated this into the design of the rovers. They are programmed to avoid exceeding tilts of more than 30 degrees although they can tilt up to 40 degrees without tipping over.

    What would be interesting is knowing how far the rovers can go. Being robots, not humans there would be a fair few limitations in their exploration.

  9. Now THIS is an interesting picture: by NeuroManson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/n/095 /1N136619354EFF2000P1985R0M1.JPG

    Take a gander at the center of the crater. How many folks familiar with wind eroded ice recognise that kind of formation?

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    1. Re:Now THIS is an interesting picture: by Muad'Dave · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What caught my eye was the 'tendrils' on the right that appear to be flowing down the crater. Could it be an underground water source spilling water into the crater whenever the temperature and pressure are high enough? I think so.

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    2. Re:Now THIS is an interesting picture: by jdray · · Score: 2, Interesting
      That's exactly what I thought, too. It looks to me like a glacier face in the fall, when the wind and sun have eroded it heavily all summer, and the wind has frosted it with dust along all the peaks.

      And those tendrils, as someone else pointed out, look to be seepage flowing out onto the surface and freezing. Eventually it would work its way downhill (gravity and all) as the water continued to push out, the stuff coming later protected, even for the barest few moments, by the ice that was just formed. It wouldn't take long for a tendril to reach the bottom of the crater, where the cycle would continue, pushing the ice upward as newly formed material flows in at the bottom.

      I'd wager that a quick examination of that mound shows that it's water ice. If that's true, then it's going to set off a huge race for manned missions to Mars, because free flowing water, at whatever temperature, is probably the best place to look for life.

      --
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    3. Re:Now THIS is an interesting picture: by Tackhead · · Score: 2, Interesting
      > Not only does the center look markedly different from the surrounding dust deposits, but there are some clearly visible features sloping down into the center from the right; could it be frozen seepage?

      I'll play killjoy here - and place 10 quatloos that the bottom formation is accumulated sand (possibly crusted up like some of the soil we've seen before), and the crater wall formations are indicative of a change in composition of the underlying bedrock.

      But I'd really like to get that rover down there and prove me wrong.

      I think the layering in the (sedimentary?) rock on the top of the far rim of the crater is also pretty interesting, although I can't think of a way to safely get up there for a closer look.

  10. Re:Don't jump to conclusions... by psoriac · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I worked in my university's robotics research department during my undergrad studies. My job as a cs student was to write the motion control algorithms for a group of math grad students. The project was to develop an AI that could navigate a building and perform tasks autonomously given a floorplan, its starting location, a destination, and an action to perform.

    The robot platform that they were using had a styrofoam head mounted on top of a cylinder with a pair of treads. The head had two cameras mounted where the eyes would be and two microphones mounted where the ears would be. The idea was that the robot would be able to understand simple voice commands, be able to detect transient obstacles (mostly people) using the cameras, and be able to track its location using the cameras (landmarks) and treads (distance rolled).

    By the end of the semester, we actually had it working halfway decently. One issue we encountered with tracking distance using how much the treads had turned was that the treads tended to slip when turning and also on dusty/dirty patches of the floor, so that over time the internal position diverged from the actual position (which is where the cameras came in).

    Now seeing as how this was almost 10 years ago and it was just a bunch of undergrad and grad students, I'm sure that the specialists at NASA have been able to accomplish something truly amazing with their rover. My hats off to them.

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  11. How Endurance Crater Got Its Name by ScottMaxwell · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I don't know if this is common knowledge, but I thought y'all might be interested to know how Endurance Crater got its name. I don't think I'll be telling tales out of school if I relate this story. This is an excerpt from a mission diary I've been writing as a way of keeping my wife in the loop, which was especially important when we were all on Mars time and I wasn't seeing her for weeks on end. From way back on sol 3 [insert wavy lines here] ....

    The most interesting part of the meeting was a fifteen- or twenty-minute discussion about naming geological features. One of the first proposals was related to naming the craters we saw in the descent images. The starting suggestion was to name them after coins, partly because people are familiar with coins and partly as a thank-you to the descent imager, which is named DIMES. More specifically, they'd be named for the people on the coins -- Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and so on. To avoid being too America-centric, we'd also use coins from other countries -- especially Germany, Denmark, Brazil, and France, our international partners on this mission.

    The same discussion included how to name the landmarks we can see from the landing site, such as the hills to the east and the peak to the south. The initial suggestion was to name the distant hills "Endurance Hills," for the name of Shackleton's ship (and to reflect what it will take us to get there, if we decide to drive to them), and then name other features after the members of Shackleton's crew. There's some concern about tying ourselves so closely to a mission that, as romantic as it was, was technically a failure ("did not fundamentally meet its Level-1 requirements," as Squyres jokingly put it).

    A more general version of that proposal emerged later: name the landmarks after explorers generally (or, in another variant, after their ships -- this would also allow us to tip our cap to Beagle 2). One advantage of this is that there have been many explorers from all lands, so we could easily give the names an international flavor. (And we could include Darwin in the honorees, which is a big plus as far as I'm concerned.) A problem with this is that the same explorer is usually perceived differently by different cultures -- Columbus might be the most obvious example (though nobody brought him up explicitly), but for nearly any famous explorer you can think of, there's someone who thinks of him less as an explorer and more as a marauder. The idea was gaining momentum despite this drawback, until our NASA HQ rep said something like "I can just see the name 'Pillager Hills,'" which provoked a lot of laughter and seemed to deflate the proposal.

    Other suggestions for geological features: deliberately generic names such as "East Hills" and "South Knob" (derided as "too boring"), names drawn from the coined words in Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," and names of general qualities such as "Forbearance" and "Courage." The last proposal fits reasonably nicely with the rover names ("Spirit" and "Opportunity") and lets us preserve "Endurance" as the name for the hills to the east. But I think it might have lost some of its support when someone jokingly suggested "Chastity" as one of the names ("Well, it is going to be a long mission," Squyres laughed).

    Yet another proposal that came up late: craters are ring-like, and The Lord of the Rings is popular right now, so why not use Tolkien-based names? A downside is that this might be too topical, but the idea has some support despite that.

    Right now, I don't think any proposal is winning. We have to settle on something before too much longer, because our jobs are easier when the features have names, but it's a hard problem: we don't want to be too exclusive (that is, too America-focused), too generic, too topical, or too serious. ("Too serious" is a problem because we don't want the International Astronomical Union to think we're trying to usurp their job of giving these o

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    ``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
  12. News disappearance? by arfuni · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is it just me or did the landers totally disappear from all major news sources? I haven't caught mention of them on CNN, BBC and the like in quite a while. Did the government stop spending the money on press releases when they failed to take heat off of the administration and/or capture public attention?

    1. Re:News disappearance? by johnjay · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They didn't totally disappear (news search), they just aren't front-page news. Since discovering good evidence for water, there's not that much of excitment to the general public that's going on with the rovers. Heck, I think the rovers are great, but I don't do much more than look at pictures on the NASA website every few days. I don't know enough about geology to make much of the spectroscopy. All the successful space launches that went on before the Columbia disaster were not news-worthy either. The ADD public is interested in change and excitement, it's just the way news works.

      That being said, I think your last question is fishing for a controversy that isn't there. I remember seeing a routine NASA rover briefing recently that was sparsely populated by reporters. The NASA people at the podium had to beg the reporters to ask them questions--the reporters either weren't interested, didn't have the scientific background, or (most likely, in my opinion) had been assigned to NASA's briefing that morning and didn't know enough about recent Rover events to have questions. NASA's trying to get the word out, but the new agencies aren't interested. They've got Michael Jackson and Iraq; that's much more interesting. I believe NASA has briefings every week, but not a lot of reporters show up unless there's something big about to be announced.

    2. Re:News disappearance? by pease1 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      There was little question this would happen... if you watched the daily news briefings for the two weeks after the landings, each day there were fewer and fewer reporters in the room.

      The rovers quickly became "old" news for most editors. How many pictures of rocks and sand dunes can the average public handle? Niche writers - the hardcore science writers - could be handled one on one. No doubt travel budgets were a factor. Even /. stopped covering it.

      Besides, the daily press briefings were likely a real time sink for the rover teams, getting ready, attending and following up on the questions.

      Besides, when the briefings stopped and the daily news articles stopped, the real science could start. The really great thing is while 15 years ago, we could have never followed what was happening day-to-day, these days, all you had to do was check the rover website.

      But, I bet we see a flurry of articles Thursday/Friday as they release the color images of Endurance. But just for the day. Perhaps some more when Opportunity dives into the crater.

  13. Re:Harakiri by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you look at the driving plan thus far and at the surroundings, you see that endurance crater is pretty much the only big interesting feature in the area.

    There are lots of whitish patches further to the south (outside of your images) that may be more rock flatbeds. But they may just be more of the same as seen already, from the same geological layer. Plus, they are a bit far. Thus, I tend to agree with you, Endurance looks like the best bet even with the risk because the impact that made the crater seems to have exposed a lower layer not seen elsewhere.

    Note that Opportunity almost got stuck in the first crater, but they played with the driving techniques and eventually got out. They got out by going at an angle instead of pointing directly out. But angles increase the risk of tip-overs. The soil is very slippery it seems.

    But bigger risk sometimes means bigger science.

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