15 August 2011
This image was acquired on Mars, the Red Planet, by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, a robotic six-wheeled rover, exploring Mars since 2004. It shows the rim of a Martian crater, known as Endeavor crater. This crater is believed to contain interesting geological deposits, and evidence for the past existence of water on Mars.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, a robotic six-wheeled rover, studying the Red Planet since 2004, has arrived at a new research area, a crater known as Endeavour crater, to examine interesting rocks, and search for evidence of past presence of water on Mars. The slowly roaming rover, operating as a robot geologist, reached Endeavor crater on 9 August 2011.
Opportunity is as big as a golf cart. It was launched toward Mars in July 2003, and touched down on the planet in January 2004. It performed numerous observations of the Martian geology, weather and sky, and made startling discoveries, including the discovery of a meteorite on Mars. Opportunity has an identical twin, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, which landed on Mars three weeks earlier, on the opposite side of the planet. Scientists, however, lost contact with Spirit, in 2010.
An artist’s rendition of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity
Credit: Maas Digital LLC for Cornell University and NASA/JPL
Opportunity has also been studying another crater, known as Victoria crater, located about 21 km from Endeavor crater, for more than two years.
“NASA is continuing to write remarkable chapters in our nation’s story of exploration with discoveries on Mars and trips to an array of challenging new destinations,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “Opportunity’s findings and data from the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory will play a key role in making possible future human missions to Mars and other places where humans have not yet been.”
Endeavour crater is 22 km across. At Endeavour, scientists expect to find much older rocks and terrains than those examined previously by Opportunity. Endeavour became an intriguing site after NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft, observing Mars from orbit around the planet, detected clay minerals that may have formed in an early warmer and wetter period. MRO, which launched in August 2005, is searching for evidence that water existed on the Martian surface for a long period of time.
Other Mars missions have demonstrated water flowed across the surface in the planet's history, but scientists have not determined if water remained long enough to provide a habitat for life.
References
NASA
www.nasa.gov/
Wikipedia
Further Reading
Mars Exploration Rovers Website
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist