July 31, 2011
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Mars Exploration Rovers
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Maas Digital
Opportunity seemed to sail with the wind behind her back toward the western rim of Endeavour Crater this month as the Mars Exploration Rover team shifted gears in preparation for a whole new adventure, taking time out only to bid a final farewell both privately and publicly to Spirit.
Endeavour is estimated to be about 22 kilometers (14 miles) in diameter, and its western rim exposes outcrops that harbor clues of environments older than any Opportunity has found to date, promising to take the rover and the MER science team farther back in Martian time than any other site this rover has toured … back to that time, billions and billions of years ago, when Mars was warm and wet and rich with habitats from which life could emerge and thrive.
It's been a long time coming. Ever since Opportunity pulled away from Victoria Crater in late September 2008, Steve Squyres, of Cornell University, the principal investigator for rover science, has repeated the rover's simple prime directive like a mantra: Drive, drive, drive."
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