Opportunity Rover Arrives at Endurance Crater

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."

Comments

They've been there since Friday

[micha2305]

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...

Spirit and the Columbia Hills

[dolphin558]

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!

Re:Spirit and the Columbia Hills

[ScottMaxwell]

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.)

Nice MER Animation

[boomgopher]

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)

Re:Stuck there forever?

[anubi]

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.

Re:Don't jump to conclusions...

[beckerie]

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.

How Endurance Crater Got Its Name

[ScottMaxwell]

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

News disappearance?

[arfuni]

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?