Today marks the start of the “teen years” on Mars for NASA’s Opportunity rover — it’s been busy exploring, studying, and traveling across the planet’s surface for 13 years now and still going strong! Launched July 7, 2003, the rover is currently in its 4,624th sol of operations — pretty impressive for a mission that was initially only planned to…
Tag: MER
Opportunity Marks 12 Years of Roving Mars
NASA’s Curiosity rover may be getting all the attention on Mars these days but the real overachiever is Opportunity — it’s been busy exploring, studying, and traveling across the planet’s surface for over 12 years now and still going strong! Launched July 7, 2003, the rover is currently in its 4,270th sol — 4,180 past…
Opportunity Celebrates 11 Years on Mars With a Grand Panorama
While we have been getting most of our daily images of Mars from NASA’s Curiosity rover over the past couple of years, we shouldn’t forget that there’s still another rover keeping busy on the Red Planet: Opportunity, one of the twin Mars Exploration Rovers (MER-B), still exploring after 11 years! To commemorate Opportunity’s upcoming landing…
The Sun Sets on Spirit
After seven years on Mars it is now time to say good night to the rover named Spirit. Since becoming irreparably stuck in the soft Martian soil near a low rise dubbed “Home Plate” nearly two years ago, Spirit has weathered a frigid Martian winter that may have damaged its electronics. Attempts to communicate with…
Mars à la Ansel Adams
Opportunity panorama of Santa Maria Crater rim. © Stuart Atkinson. As Opportunity wraps up her stay at Santa Maria crater, Stuart Atkinson leaves us with this wonderful “Ansel Adams style” panorama of the crater’s rim and dune-carpeted interior. “I’m very, very jealous of the people who will one day make a pilgrimage to this…
Work Well Done
A poignant entry on xkcd.com, a webcomic by Randall Munroe. This is based on the recent news that the rover named Spirit will now officially be a “stationary science platform”. After repeated attempts to dislodge it from its current location, wheels hopelessly embedded in soft sand in a locale called “Troy”, the decision was made…
Dug In
Since November 17 the Mars Exploration Rover team has been attempting to carefully get Spirit out of the sand trap she’s been stuck in since summer….unfortunately there’s no sign of freedom for the rover yet. The photo above, taken on November 28 with Spirit’s Forward HAZCAM camera, shows one of the major difficulties facing the…
Lights in the Dark 