[meteorite-list] Mars Rover Opportunity Working at 'Matijevic Hill'

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:27:28 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201209282227.q8SMRSKf012855_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-306

Mars Rover Opportunity Working at 'Matijevic Hill'
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
September 28, 2012

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars rover Opportunity, well into its ninth
year on Mars, will work for the next several weeks or months at a site
with some of the mission's most intriguing geological features.

The site, called "Matijevic Hill," overlooks 14-mile-wide
(22-kilometer-wide) Endeavour Crater. Opportunity has begun
investigating the site's concentration of small spherical objects
reminiscent of, but different from, the iron-rich spheres nicknamed
"blueberries" at the rover's landing site nearly 22 driving miles ago
(35 kilometers).

The small spheres at Matijevic Hill have different composition and
internal structure. Opportunity's science team is evaluating a range of
possibilities for how they formed. The spheres are up to about an
eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter.

The "blueberries" found earlier are concretions formed by the action of
mineral-laden water inside rocks, but that is only one of the ways
nature can make small, rounded particles. One working hypothesis, out of
several, is that the new-found spherules are also concretions but with a
different composition. Others include that they may be accretionary
lapilli formed in volcanic ash eruptions, impact spherules formed in
impact events, or devitrification spherules resulting from formation of
crystals from formerly melted material. There are other possibilities, too.

"Right now we have multiple working hypotheses, and each hypothesis
makes certain predictions about things like what the spherules are made
of and how they are distributed," said Opportunity's principal
investigator, Steve Squyres, of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "Our
job as we explore Matijevic Hill in the months ahead will be to make the
observations that will let us test all the hypotheses carefully, and
find the one that best fits the observations."

The team chose to refer to this important site as Matijevic Hill in
honor of Jacob Matijevic (1947-2012), who led the engineering team for
the twin Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity for several
years before and after their landings. He worked at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., from 1981 until his death last
month, most recently as chief engineer for surface operations systems of
NASA's third-generation Mars rover, Curiosity. In the 1990s, he led the
engineering team for the first Mars rover, Sojourner.

A different Mars rover team, operating Curiosity, has also named a
feature for Matijevic: a rock that Curiosity recently investigated about
halfway around the planet from Matijevic Hill.

"We wouldn't have gotten to Matijevic Hill, eight-and-a-half years after
Opportunity's landing, without Jake Matijevic," Squyres said.

Opportunity's project manager, John Callas, of JPL, said, "If there is
one person who represents the heart and soul of all three generations of
Mars rovers -- Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity -- it was Jake."

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate in Washington. For more information about Opportunity,
visit: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov .

You can follow the project on Twitter and on Facebook at:
http://twitter.com/MarsRovers and http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers .

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster at jpl.nasa.gov

2012-306
Received on Fri 28 Sep 2012 06:27:28 PM PDT