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Has the Mars Rover team stood down?
Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2011 5:07 pm
by JohnD
There is nothing new on the Mars Rover website since early October, just after Opportunity got to Endeavor.
Has the team been stood down, to free them up for Curiosity?
Strange, if it won't get there until next year, unless Nasa doesn't want anything to distract the fickle media from the launch.
JOhn
Re: Has the Mars Rover team stood down?
Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2011 5:47 pm
by neufer
JohnD wrote:
There is nothing new on the Mars Rover website since early October, just after Opportunity got to Endeavor.
Has the team been stood down, to free them up for Curiosity?
- They are preparing to hunker down for the winter:
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/mission/status.html#opportunity wrote:
OPPORTUNITY UPDATE: Scouting Sites for the Winter:
<<In preparing for positioning Opportunity for the coming winter, the project has been scouting sites with favorable northerly tilt on the north end of Cape York on the rim of Endeavour Crater. There are two candidate sites for winter havens that indicate sufficient northerly tilt. Opportunity is investigating one of those two sites with the plan to spend the Thanksgiving holiday there. Because of the coming holiday, the project implemented multi-sol plans for the last three planning days before Thanksgiving.
On Sol 2778 (Nov. 17, 2011), the rover moved just under 12 meters to the south approaching the candidate location. Rover attitude increased to 10 degrees of northerly tilt. On Sol 2780 (Nov. 19, 2011), an atmospheric argon measurement was made with the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS). On Sol 2781 (Nov. 20, 2011), Opportunity bumped just under 3 meters to reach an interesting surface target with improved rover tilt. The northerly tilt increased to about 12 degrees.
On Sol 2783 (Nov. 22, 2011), Opportunity made a very small turn to move a surface target within the work volume of the robotic arm. Another atmospheric argon measurement was collected with the APXS later that sol. The plan ahead is to spend Thanksgiving at this location and to collect Microscopic Imager (MI) images of this new surface target, called "Transvaal" along with an APXS measure of the same. Solar array energy production was 297 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.661 and a solar array dust factor of 0.463. Total odometry is 34.44 kilometers).>>
