Opportunity and its twin rover Spirit landed on the Red Planet as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project, for missions planned to last 3 months.
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Just yesterday, the U.S. space agency released a time-lapse video documenting the Opportunity’s epic 11-year marathon across the Red Planet in 8 minutes flat. The audio track has been created from vibration measurements as the rover travelled across the Martian surface: loud noises indicate that the ground was rough beneath its wheels, while quiet sounds indicate the terrain was smooth. Spirit’s run ended in 2009, while Opportunity kept going for six years after that.
Sure, sure, it took Curiosity like 11 years to complete the 26.2 miles, meaning it possibly set a solar system-wide record for the slowest marathon.
And by confident, we mean confident enough to plan “several months” of activity in “Marathon Valley, where the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has “detected exposures of clay minerals holding evidence about ancient wet environmental conditions””.
Opportunity will spend the Martian winter in a sunny stretch of the valley in a study of the surrounding geology. NASA re-formatted the rover’s flash to try and sort things out, but the problems persisted.
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The rover has been instructed to not use flash memory and to transmit data immediately upon collecting it instead of attempting to retain it overnight. “Without using flash memory, Opportunity 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”.
