Second Opportunity For Mars Rover

An anonymous reader writes "The Mars Opportunity rover faces a challenging survey around the rim of the stadium-sized Endurance Crater. In addition to what was previously described as the critical choice to go into the steep crater at the risk of not being able to get back out, this "most spectacular view we've seen of the Martian surface" may aid in answering how deep an ancient sea or lake might have been and how long it lasted. Endurance Crater appears much older and thus may pre-date arrival of significant standing water."

Comments

Better Panorama

[inio]

A much better (and much larger) version of the panorama has been available at the NASA site for days.

For those of you not aware

[Anonymous Coward]

a summary of the Mars Rover mission can be found here

Mars Rover gets us free Shrimp!

[BTWR]

Quick! You have until 5pm to get the free shrimp at Long John Silver's!

They promised that if NASA found evidence of water on Mars that they would give free Shrimp to the whole country. They followed through! (Now if only Mir had hit that Taco Bell sign...)

The plane

[roalt]

According to the article, the following plan will opportunity follow:

1. Make a round on the edge of the Endurance Crater to make measurements and see how steep the crater is.
2. If (with little risk) opportunity can drive in it and back out, it will do so before doing the following points, otherwise, do the following points first before moving into Endurance.
3. Examine the area around the heatshield, to check both the heatshield useful for future missions and to look in the deep hole the heatshield made into mars.
4. Examine some other place it passed before (but then did not have enough time) to check the composition of a rock that is different than others.

Re:interesting formations

[ImTwoSlick]

Is it created by wind? Or maybe water?

Most definately wind. Those are essentially small sand dunes. A small body of water doesn't have enough surface area to get wave formations like that.

Re:Big disappointment

[cascino]

I am going out on a limb here and say that this entire mission has really been a big disappointment to me. Although it did enhance our knowledge of the planet considerably, it did not even attempt to verify if there was/is life on the planet, which is the end goal.
The mission exceeded all it's objectives. I don't understand how that can be considered a disappointment. Detecting life, as discovered by the Viking missions, is not always an easy task. Instead, these two rovers have transformed our understanding of Martian geology, for the first time given unrefutable evidence of water's presence, traversed the greatest distance on any body's surface by an unmanned vehicle, and sent back some damn cool pictures. All for a fraction of what the war in Iraq is costing us as taxpayers.
Finding life may be the "end goal" for public relations, etc., but I'm sure there are plenty of planetary geologists that have found these missions to be among the most important endeavours in the history of unmanned missions.

Re:Hmm

[TheTimoo]

No, from what I've read, the Mars Rover has no way of cleaning it's solar panels, which means dust will settle on it and eventually render them useless for producing power.