Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Opportunity Rover Passes 25 Miles of Driving

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: July 29, 2014 3:56:20 PM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Opportunity Rover Passes 25 Miles of Driving

NASA Long-Lived Mars Opportunity Rover Sets Off-World Driving Record
This natural color view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows "Lunokhod Crater," which lies south of Solander Point on the west rim of Endeavour Crater. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.
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July 28, 2014
NASA's Opportunity Mars rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2004, now holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 25 miles (40 kilometers) of driving. The previous record was held by the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover.
"Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance. But what is really important is not how many miles the rover has racked up, but how much exploration and discovery we have accomplished over that distance."
A drive of 157 feet (48 meters) on July 27 put Opportunity's total odometry at 25.01 miles (40.25 kilometers). This month's driving brought the rover southward along the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The rover had driven more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) before arriving at Endeavour Crater in 2011, where it has examined outcrops on the crater's rim containing clay and sulfate-bearing minerals. The sites are yielding evidence of ancient environments with less acidic water than those examined at Opportunity's landing site.
If the rover can continue to operate the distance of a marathon -- 26.2 miles (about 42.2 kilometers) -- it will approach the next major investigation site mission scientists have dubbed "Marathon Valley." Observations from spacecraft orbiting Mars suggest several clay minerals are exposed close together at this valley site, surrounded by steep slopes where the relationships among different layers may be evident.
The Russian Lunokhod 2 rover, a successor to the first Lunokhod mission in 1970, landed on Earth's moon on Jan. 15, 1973, where it drove about 24.2 miles (39 kilometers) in less than five months, according to calculations recently made using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) cameras that reveal Lunokhod 2's tracks.
Irina Karachevtseva at Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography's Extraterrestrial Laboratory in Russia, Brad Jolliff of Washington University in St. Louis, Tim Parker of JPL, and others collaborated to verify the map-based methods for computing distances are comparable for Lunokhod-2 and Opportunity.
"The Lunokhod missions still stand as two signature accomplishments of what I think of as the first golden age of planetary exploration, the 1960s and '70s," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and principal investigator for NASA's twin Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit. "We're in a second golden age now, and what we've tried to do on Mars with Spirit and Opportunity has been very much inspired by the accomplishments of the Lunokhod team on the moon so many years ago. It has been a real honor to follow in their historical wheel tracks."
As Opportunity neared the mileage record earlier this year, the rover team chose the name Lunokhod 2 for a crater about 20 feet (6 meters) in diameter on the outer slope of Endeavour's rim on Mars.
The Mars Exploration Rover Project is one element of NASA's ongoing and future Mars missions preparing for a human mission to the planet in the 2030s. JPL manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages LRO for the Science Mission Directorate.
For more information about NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, visit these sites:
http://www.nasa.gov/rovers
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov
Follow the project on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/MarsRovers
On Facebook, visit:
http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers
An image of Lunokhod 2's tracks, as imaged by NASA's LRO, is available online at:
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/774
Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6278
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

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

2014-245

Images
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, working on Mars since January 2004, passed 25 miles of total driving on the July 27, 2014. The gold line on this map shows Opportunity's route from the landing site inside Eagle Crater, in upper left, to its location after the July 27 (Sol 3735) drive.
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This stereo view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows "Lunokhod Crater," which lies south of Solander Point on the west rim of Endeavour Crater. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.
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NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity Breaks Off-World Driving Record
By Mike Wall, Senior Writer | July 28, 2014 05:19pm ET

NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars has now boldly gone farther than any vehicle has before on the surface of another world, space agency officials announced today (July 28).
As of Sunday (July 27), the Opportunity rover has driven 25.01 miles (40.2 kilometers) on the Red Planet, NASA officials said. The distance record had been held by the Soviet Union's remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which covered 24.2 miles (39 km) on the moon back in 1973.
"Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world," Opportunity project manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance. But what is really important is not how many miles the rover has racked up, but how much exploration and discovery we have accomplished over that distance." [Distances Driven on Other Worlds (Infographic)]
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, having been on Mars since January 2004, exceeded 25 miles of total drivindg on July 27, 2014. The yellow line indicates Opportunity's route from the landing site.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/NMMNHS
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There has been some uncertainty regarding how far Lunokhod 2 actually went on the moon during its five months of operation in 1973. The lunar rover's record was initially set at 23 miles (37 km), then upped last year to 26 miles (42 km) by a Russian team that analyzed photos of Lunokhod 2 tracks taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a view of "Lunokhod Crater," lying south of Solander Point on the west rim of Endeavour Crater. This image was taken on April 24, 2014 and released on July 28.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.
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But that estimate was revised downward recently, and NASA is confident that Opportunity is indeed now the record holder. An international team has confirmed that the methods used to calculate the two rovers' odometry is consistent and comparable from the moon to Mars, agency officials said.
Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, landed in different parts of Mars in January 2004 on a three-month mission to search for evidence of past water activity. Both rovers found plenty of such evidence, then kept on exploring the Red Planet; Spirit ceased communicating with Earth in 2010, while Opportunity is still going strong today.
Lunokhod 2 helped pave the way for such accomplishments, Opportunity team members said.
Driving on other planets is a tough feat of space engineering. See the distances driven by robots and vehicles on the moon and Mars in this Space.com infographic.
Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com
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"The Lunokhod missions still stand as two signature accomplishments of what I think of as the first golden age of planetary exploration, the 1960s and '70s," said Spirit and Opportunity principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University.
"We're in a second golden age now, and what we've tried to do on Mars with Spirit and Opportunity has been very much inspired by the accomplishments of the Lunokhod team on the moon so many years ago," he added. "It has been a real honor to follow in their historical wheel tracks."
Earlier this year, Squyres and his colleagues named a small crater on the rim of the huge Endeavour Crater, which Opportunity has been exploring since August 2011, "Lunokhod 2" in homage to the Soviet robot.
Opportunity will complete an off-world marathon (26.2 miles, or 42.2 km) if it can keep rolling along for another mile or so. If Opportunity makes it that far — and there's no reason to doubt the rover, since mission managers say Opportunity remains in good health despite its advanced age — the six-wheeled robot will get close to a site the mission team has dubbed "Marathon Valley."
NASA's other operational Mars rover, the 1-ton Curiosity, has a long way to go before it can even get within sniffing distance of Opportunity's record. The odometer on Curiosity, which touched down in August 2012, won't click over to double-digit miles for a while yet.

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