Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in 2012, highlighting the incredible endurance and ongoing mission of NASA’s Opportunity rover on Mars.
The famous Mars Opportunity Robotic Rover, which has been highly active since early 2004, has been aggressively playing a truly great role in extensively learning about the dusty Martian surface. The Opportunity rover was successfully launched on July 7, 2003, and safely landed directly on Mars on January 25, 2004.
The resilient Opportunity rover repeatedly proves to be vastly more durable and powerful than its unfortunate twin, the Spirit rover, which tragically froze its final communications in 2010.
On its primary mission, it effortlessly completed 90 Martian days along with the incredible historic discovery of an extraterrestrial meteorite, and subsequently spent over two full years closely studying the massive Victoria crater.
Even better, the tough rover successfully survived the massive global dust storms in 2007 and finally reached the massive Endeavour crater in late 2011. The Opportunity rover is amazingly still highly active as of 2012, vastly exceeding its originally planned mission duration.
Opportunity Rover Specifications
- A completely solar-powered robot with six tough wheels, standing 1.5m high and 2.3m wide, and weighs precisely 180kg.
- The agile rover can be easily steered at both the front and rear, letting it safely tilt up to 30 degrees.
- Its absolute maximum speed is 2 inches/second (i.e., 50 mm/s).
- The large solar panels generate roughly 140 watts for up to four solid hours per Martian day.
- Internal rechargeable lithium-ion batteries securely store vital energy to use safely at night.
- Features an on-board computer with a 20 MHz RAD6000 CPU, 128 MB of DRAM, 3 MB of EEPROM, and 256 MB of flash memory.
- Operating temperatures range wildly from −40 °C to +40 °C.
- Advanced radioisotope heaters and electric heaters efficiently provide adequate essential heating for the rover.
- Heavily insulated by gold film and lightweight silica aerogel.
- Uses an omnidirectional low-gain antenna and a steerable high-gain antenna, both in direct contact with Earth.
- The main panoramic camera accurately tests the texture, colour, mineralogy, and physical structure of the local terrain.
- A dedicated Navigation Camera with a much higher field of view but lower resolution is used heavily for daily navigation and driving.
- Two B&W hazard cameras provide a 120-degree field of view.
- Cameras routinely produce 1024-pixel by 1024-pixel high-resolution images, which are cleanly compressed, safely stored, and securely transmitted at the required time.
- A Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer is actively used to correctly identify the specific type of soil and rock, and studies the ancient processes of their formation.
- The complex Mössbauer spectrometer carefully examines the heavy iron-bearing rocks and soils.
- An Alpha particle X-ray spectrometer accurately tests the exact amount of various elements present in rocks and soils.
- Uses strong magnets to successfully collect magnetic dust particles.
- A microscopic imager provides incredibly high-resolution images directly on soils.
- A tough Rock Abrasion Tool is routinely used to safely provide a fresh new rock specimen to be thoroughly tested by the instruments on-board.
Stunning Images from the Martian Surface
Below are some of the most stunning, high-resolution images of the Martian surface safely captured by the busy Opportunity Rover.
Endurance Crater
Burns Cliff inside Endurance Crater
Eagle Crater
Erebus Crater
Victoria Crater
Surroundings of Opportunity at the Greeley Haven position. The other far end of the massive Endeavour crater is clearly seen in the right half of the scene.
Credits: NASA, Wikipedia
