NASA Long-lived Mars Opportunity Rover Sets Off-world Driving Record

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers — Spirit and its twin Opportunity — were designed to study the history of climate and water at sites on Mars where conditions may once have been favorable to life. Each rover was equipped with a suite of science instruments to read the geologic record at each site, to investigate what role water played there and to determine how suitable the conditions would have been for life. Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Cornell University, Maas Digital LLCNASA’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, CA. “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, 2014, 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.

Fonte: Scientific Computing