A marathon on Mars | The Spokesman
The video shows the Opportunity’s marathon, considered to be the slowest one, across Mars having a number of photos captured by the rover’s cameras between January 2004 and April 2015. The short video covers 11 years of movement across the Red Planet.
NASA has released a video, which is of eight minutes, showing the 11-year journey of the Opportunity Mars rover. Spirit’s run ended in 2009, while Opportunity kept going for six years after that.
Controllers are preparing Opportunity for the next leg of its travels.
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””. There, the rover will spend the Martian winter and will study the area’s geology. “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”.
A problem previous year with the rover’s nonvolatile flash memory saw random resets that resulted in loss of telemetry, project scientists at JPL say.
NASA now says “occurrences increased again later in the spring” and has therefore made a decision to avoid using flash because doing so glitches the rover and necessitates more remediation attempts.
That won’t interfere with its ability to do useful science, says Opportunity Project Manager John Callas. “Flash memory is a convenience but not a necessity for the rover”.