Opportunity lander
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Mars

'Opportunity Lander'

    • The Mars Rover Exploration B (Mer-B), dubbed `Opportunity`, landed on Mars, on January 25th 2004. Touchdown was at roughly 5:05 a.m. Universal Time, in the Meridiani Hematite site.
    The geographical coordinates for the centre of Opportunity's landing target are 1.98 degrees south latitude and 5.94 degrees west longitude. The targeted landing area is an ellipse about 85 kilometres (53 miles) long and 11 kilometres (6.8 miles) wide.

    The sister ship `Spirit` landed in the Gusev Crater on the 4th January 2004.

    Here is a list of all the Martian probes and spacecraft.

    NASA announced plans to name the landing site of the Mars Opportunity lander in honour of the Space Shuttle Challenger's final crew. The Spirit lander carries a memorial disk for the Columbia shuttle crash.

    opportunity
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    The Meridiani Hematite Planum site: The white ellipse marks the approximate location of Opportunity's landing zone.
    Opportunity Rover

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    The Viking Lander site
    Hesperia Planum Mars bedrock, near opportunity landing site
    This color image view to the west-southwest of the rover was taken from the rover's panoramic camera. The rim of the crater is approximately 10 meters (32 feet) from the rover. Opportunity successfully leaves its lander!

    Opportunity lander, the second of two Nasa rovers, has successfully landed on the Martian surface where it will search for signs of water on the planet. The rover touched down at 0505 GMT, halfway around the red planet from where Spirit rover landed on the 4th January.
    Opportunity landed on a smooth, flat plain, in the highest altitude landing ever attempted by Nasa. The Meridium Planum is a zone of grey hematite, an iron oxide.

    A periodic fluctuation in the lander's first signal suggested that it rolled on the Martian surface for more than 20 minutes after landing. There were no fault tone signals, indicating that there were no errors during landing and rolling.

    Opportunity Lander approached the Martian surface at a speed of 19,000 km/h (12,000 mph). It deployed a parachute to slow its descent and airbags to cushion its landing. Rockets on the lander counteracted light gusts of wind during the descent.
    Because of this, it touched down with a force of between two to three Gs - an exceptionally gentle landing. The rover was designed to withstand a landing of up to 40G ; landing about 24 kilometres downrange from the centre of the target area.The lander ended up lying on one of its side petals, so the next step is to make itself upright and deflate its airbags.
    The spacecraft sits in a shallow crater about 20 meters (66 feet) across.
    Images taken by a camera on the bottom of the lander during Opportunity's final descent show a crater about 150 meters (about 500 feet) across , about one kilometre from the landing site.

    The exposed Martian bedrock, near the lander, has a slab-like form which could have been created either by volcanic activity or by the action of water.
    These layered rocks measure only 10 centimeters (4 inches) tall and are thought to be either volcanic ash deposits or sediments carried by water or wind. The small rock in the center is about the size of a golf ball. 3D model of the opportunity lander crater Photographs taken using a microscopic imager on the rover's robotic arm show a coin-sized patch of grainy soil covered in tiny pebbles

    Nasa's robot rover Opportunity has found spherical grains in the soil of Mars, suggesting they could have been rounded by the action of water. However, meteorite collisions can also produce rounded grains (tektites) by melting Martian rock on impact. If the original Martian rock had water in it at the time of the impact gas could have formed in the molten material, which may explain the small holes or bubbles seen.

    The spheres could also be frozen drops of lava ejected by a volcanic eruption (called lapillae), or, most excitingly, particles formed by slow chemical accretion in a body of water (called oolites). (As an observation certain bacteria also form the `holes` seen on the grains of soil.
    The bedrock doesn't contain any hematite. So they will have to look elsewhere to find out where the hematite came from.
    The hematite is in a layer of dark material that sits atop the lighter-coloured bedrock, and the darker material is cascading or being transported down into the crater.

    Opportunity has driven off the lander.
    Opportunity's lander platform successfully tilted itself forward by pulling airbag material under the rear portion of the lander then flexing its rear petal downward. This lowered the front edge . The tips of the egress ramp are now in the soil.

    Click to Enlarge! The first 360 degree, high-resolution color image taken by the rover's panoramic camera.
    First Mineral Map From Another Planet!

    It is too soon to say whether this bedrock is sedimentary or volcanic, but it is only about 10 metres away and the rover is fully equipped to find out. Identifying whether Mars has sedimentary rocks - and thereby proving whether it once had long-standing bodies of water - is a primary goal of the rovers' mission.

    Note: There have been voiced concerns over the rover rock data... It is claimed the rovers' Mossbauer spectrometers will not adequately tell between minerals that form in the presence of water and ones that do not. The Mossbauer spectrometer is designed to determine the mineral composition of rocks. It works by spraying gamma rays at a target mineral and then measuring the fraction of atoms which do not recoil. However, it doesn`t distinguish between minerals that have hydrogen in their structure and minerals that don't... The presence of iron hydroxides, for example, would strongly indicate the past presence of water on Mars. In addition, the Mossbauer spectra of minerals look different depending on the temperature of that mineral... Nasa is collecting data on how to compensate for these findings.

    First panorama
    First colour photo Meridiani Planum is interesting because it contains an ancient layer of hematite, an iron oxide that, on Earth, almost always forms in an environment containing liquid water.
    The area is unique on Mars because there's so much exposed hematite there, according to data gathered by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. Localized deposits also exist in two other sites: the deep canyon Valles Marinaris and a place called Aram Chaos.
    The hematite abundance index map was created using data from the miniature thermal emission instrument. The first layer is a mosaic of panoramic camera images taken prior to egress, when Opportunity was still on the lander. The colored dots represent data collected by the miniature thermal emission spectrometer on sol 11
    This hematite abundance index map helps geologists choose hematite-rich locations to visit around Opportunity's landing site. Blue dots equal areas low in hematite and red dots equal areas high in hematite.

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    Engage!
    Opportunity was launched on a heavy Delta II 7925H on 8 July 2003 at 03:18:15 UT.
    Rover

    Rover

    Power is provided by the solar arrays, generating up to 140 W of power under full Sun conditions. The energy is stored in two rechargeable batteries. Communications with Earth are in X-band via the high gain directional dish antenna and the low gain omni-directional antenna. Communications with orbiting spacecraft are through the UHF antenna.

    The rovers contain most powerful CPU's ever to have been sent to another planet. The operating system, VxWorks OS, made by Wind River Systems Inc. runs on the radiation-hardened (military-grade chips, by IBM IIRC.) 20-MHz Rad 6000 CPU (PowerPC-compatible) module aboard the NASA rovers.

    The memory is a mere 128Mb RAM and 256Mb of flash memory...
    (Hum, Sounds like an Amiga to me...)

    Remember to visit the FORUM for the latest news.
    click here! To play the Drake Equation game.
    click here! To download a zooming panorama of the bedrock outcrop.
    Images from the viking landers.
    click here! For more information on Mars.
    landing site mosaic 24.4 Mb download. (10m/pixel view)
    Mars Planet Surface 8192x4096 13.3 Mb download.
    Mars Planet Surface 4096x2048 821 Kb download.
    Mars `Spirit` vista 115 Kb download.
    Webcast - NASA Science Briefing - 06/06/2002
    click here! To download Marsrover animation.
    click here! To download PC screensaver. (2,2Mb)
    click here! To watch realplayer stream of `The sky at night` (February).
    The Spirit Mars Rover may have captured a meteor streaking across the sky on the evening of Sol 426.
    NASA has suspended use of the thermal emission spectrometer,
    a mineral-identifying tool, onboard the Opportunity Mars rover due to a problem. The problem emerged on March 3rd 2005 , when eight of 17 attempted readings by the instrument yielded incomplete data sets.
    The malfunction may be due to an optical switch that tells a mirror in the instrument when to begin moving. Or the mirror might not be properly moving at a constant velocity.
    Opportunity is currently observing a crater called Vostok.

    NASA's Mars rovers

    Doh!
    Opportunity and Spirit are identical twins - so alike that they even fooled NASA. Researchers have discovered that they sent the robots to Mars with an alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS), an instrument, meant for Opportunity inside Spirit and vice versa. Opportunity had falsely found higher concentrations of certain elements in the soil at its Meridiani Planum landing site than Spirit had at the Gusev Crater. While the bungle does not undermine the main scientific conclusions drawn from the data collected by the rovers, it is an embarrassing slip-up for a space agency that once lost a Mars spacecraft because engineers mixed up metric and imperial units.
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    Software Downloads
    PC Freeware program Mars Previewer II Shows the current phase of Mars and allows you to point and identify the major features, displaying their coordinates. Hum, for Windows...
    A PC freeware version of the primary software tool used by NASA scientists to operate the Mars Exploration Rovers. Download Maestro for free and use it to follow along with the rovers' progress during the mission. You can use Maestro to view pictures from Mars in 2D and 3D and create simplified rover activity plans. During the mission, updates will be released for Maestro containing the latest images from Mars. (38.15 MB)
    Remember to download the first Maestro Mars data update, which contains the first images acquired by Spirit on Mars!
    Mars24 is a freeware cross-platform Java application and applet which displays a graphical representation of Mars showing the current sun- and nightsides of Mars, along with a numerical readout of the time in 24-hour format. Other displays include a plot showing the relative orbital positions of Mars and Earth and a diagram showing the solar angle for a given location on Mars. (683.59 Kb)
    WATCH! Mars, the Next Frontier: August 2003
    In this extended Sky-at-night programme, Patrick Moore talks to Sir Arthur C Clarke about terraforming and manned exploration, and to Beagle 2's creator, Professor Colin Pillinger.
    WATCH! Mars, the Next Frontier: February 2004
    In this Sky-at-night programme, Patrick Moore talks about the Mars probes .