[meteorite-list] Mars Rover Escapes from the 'Bay of Lamentation'

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Jun 7 22:45:56 2006
Message-ID: <200606071558.IAA07761_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn9286-mars-rover-escapes-from-the-bay-of-lamentation.html

Mars rover escapes from the "Bay of Lamentation"
Kelly Young
New Scientist
06 June 2006

NASA's Opportunity rover has once again freed itself from a sand trap on
Mars.

On 28 May, the rover's two rear wheels became mired
in loose soil that the vehicle unexpectedly encountered while driving in
a trough between two dunes. The rover was expected to drive for 24
metres but only made it 1.5 m, as its wheels churned in the soft soil.

To escape, the rover drove backwards for 5 to 28 centimetres each day.
And at 0600 EDT (1000 GMT) on Tuesday, mission managers learned that the
strategy had worked - all six of the rovers' wheels were back on solid
bedrock.

Rover officials do not yet know what caused the wheels to get stuck, but
they planned to turn Opportunity's cameras back on the trouble spot on
Tuesday to find out more.

And they have decided to name the sand trap "Jammerbugt", which
translates to "Bay of Lamentation" in Danish. "It's a bay on the
northwest coast of Denmark that historically has been the site of many
shipwrecks," Steve Squyres, the rovers' principal investigator and a
planetary scientist at Cornell University in New York, US, told New
Scientist.

Slip checks

The rover team will continue to use Danish names for any new features it
discovers in the next several weeks, in honour of the country's
contributions to the mission. Several Danes work on the rover and Danish
institutions provided instruments to study magnetic minerals in the Red
Planet's soil, rocks and atmospheric dust. Denmark also celebrated its
Constitution Day on Monday.

This is not the first time Opportunity has become trapped on Mars. It
got stuck in another location, nicknamed "Purgatory Dune", in April
2005, and was delayed for five weeks.

That experience caused the rover team to implement slip checks that stop
the rover from driving if its wheels slip beyond a certain amount. The
checks prevented Opportunity from getting seriously entrenched in this trap.

After the rover observes the soil that ensnared it, it will continue
trundling south towards an 800-metre-wide crater called Victoria that
still lies 900 metres away. "Southward ho," Squyres says.
Received on Wed 07 Jun 2006 11:58:06 AM PDT