Opportunity Embarks on New Endeavour, Spirit Gets Back To Normal Schedule

By A.J.S. Rayl September 30, 2008

Click to enlarge > Mars Exploration Rover Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Maas Digital

It's been a September to remember for the Mars Exploration Rovers with Spirit producing enough power to return to its science assignments on a daily basis and Opportunity commanding the spotlight once again as it embarked on a long journey toward a new, humongous crater and one of the most ambitious adventures undertaken on the mission.

After driving out of Victoria Crater in the final days of August, Opportunity spent a few Martian sols investigating the three sets of tracks it's made over the last couple of years at Duck Bay, then roved back toward the crater to check out a classic Martian ripple at the rim. There, the rover, which suffers from frozen shoulder, and its handlers "practiced new techniques" for how to reach its instrument deployment device (IDD) targets, said Sharon Laubach, the integrated sequencing team chief, who oversees mission managers, rover planners, and most of the people who sequence the commands that turn the scientists' objectives into the instructions sent to the rovers.

Opportunity then headed toward an area the team named in honor of desert explorer Ralph Alger Bagnold. "It looked like the cleanest patch of Meridiani dust that we've seen anywhere," said Steve Squyres, of Cornell University, the principal investigator for rover science. And the MER science team was anxious to determine its composition with its mineral detecting instruments.

Located on the lee side of the rim, the target was in "a little dust trap that also turned out to be a nasty little rover trap," said Squyres. Opportunity slipped repeatedly trying to scale the ridge leading to the chosen target within Bagnold, Laubach said, so the MER team instructed the rover to abandon that assignment and rove on toward its next major destination.

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