[meteorite-list] Opportunity Rover's 7th Mars Winter to Include New Study Area

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2015 16:45:33 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201507062345.t66NjXTJ011482_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4651

Opportunity Rover's 7th Mars Winter to Include New Study Area
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
July 6, 2016

Fast Facts:

* Scientists and engineers plan to use NASA's Mars rover Opportunity throughout
the upcoming Martian winter to examine exposures of clay minerals.

* First, the rover is studying a band of reddish material at the edge
of "Spirit of St. Louis Crater."

Operators of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity plan to drive the
rover into a valley this month where Opportunity will be active through
the long-lived rover's seventh Martian winter, examining outcrops that
contain clay minerals.

Opportunity resumed driving on June 27 after about three weeks of reduced
activity around Mars solar conjuntion, when the sun's position between
Earth and Mars disrupts communication. The rover is operating in a mode
that does not store any science data overnight. It transmits the data
the same day they're collected.

The rover is working about half a football field's length away from entering
the western end of "Marathon Valley," a notch in the raised rim of Endeavour
Crater, which is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. Opportunity
landed on Mars in 2004 and has been studying the rim of Endeavour since
2011.

Engineers and scientists operating Opportunity have chosen Marathon Valley
as the location for the solar-powered rover to spend several months, starting
in August, to take advantage of a sun-facing slope loaded with potential
science targets.

Marathon Valley stretches about three football fields long, aligned generally
east-west. Observations of the valley using the Compact Reconnaissance
Imaging Spectrometer for Mars aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
have detected exposures of clay minerals holding evidence about ancient
wet environmental conditions. Researchers plan to use Opportunity to investigate
relationships among these clay-bearing deposits.

The team plans to drive Opportunity this month to sites on the valley's
northern side, where the slope faces south. Right now, it is early autumn
in the southern hemisphere of Mars. The shortest day of the hemisphere's
winter won't come until January. As the sun's daily track across the northern
sky gets shorter, the north-facing slope on the southern side of the valley
will offer the advantage of tilting the rover's solar panels toward the
sun, to boost the amount of electrical energy production each day.

First, though, the mission's initial activities for a few days after emerging
from the solar conjunction period are to examine rocks in and near a band
of reddish material at the northern edge of an elongated crater called
"Spirit of St. Louis." During the driving moratorium, the rover used the
alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on the end of its robotic arm to assess
the chemical composition of a target in this red zone.

The rover is operating in a mode that avoids use of the type of onboard
memory -- non-volatile flash memory -- that can retain data even when
power is turned off overnight. It is using random-access memory, which
retains data while power is on. The rover operated productively in this
mode for several months in 2014. A reformatting of the flash memory earlier
this year temporarily slowed the frequency of flash-induced computer resets,
but the reset occurrences increased again later in the spring.

"Opportunity can continue to accomplish science goals in this mode," said
Opportunity Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, California. "Each day we transmit data that we collect that
day."

"Flash memory is a convenience but not a necessity for the rover," Callas
said. "It's like a refrigerator that way. Without it, you couldn't save
any leftovers. Any food you prepare that day you would have to either
eat or throw out. Without using flash memory, Opportunty needs to send
home the high-priority data the same day it collects it, and lose any
lower-priority data that can't fit into the transmission."

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project landed twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity
on Mars in 2004 to begin missions planned to last three months. Both rovers
far exceeded those plans. Spirit worked for six years, and Opportunity
is still active. Findings about ancient wet environments on Mars have
come from both rovers. The project is one element of NASA's ongoing and
future Mars missions preparing for a human mission to the planet in the
2030s. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages
the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about Opportunity, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/rovers

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov

Follow the project on Twitter and Facebook at:

http://twitter.com/MarsRovers

http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers


Media Contact

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

Dwayne Brown
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov

2015-228
Received on Mon 06 Jul 2015 07:45:33 PM PDT