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NASA's Opportunity at 10: New Findings from Old Rover
New findings from rock samples collected and examined by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity have confirmed an ancient wet environment that was milder and older than the acidic and oxidizing conditions told by rocks the rover examined previously.

In the Jan. 24 edition of the journal Science, Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, writes in detail about the discoveries made by the rover and how these discoveries have shaped our knowledge of the planet. According to Arvidson and others on the team, the latest evidence from Opportunity is landmark.

"These rocks are older than any we examined earlier in the mission, and they reveal more favorable conditions for microbial life than any evidence previously examined by investigations with Opportunity," said Arvidson.

While the Opportunity team celebrates the rover's 10th anniversary on Mars, they also look forward to what discoveries lie ahead and how a better understanding of Mars will help advance plans for human missions to the planet in the 2030s.

Opportunity's original mission was to last only three months. On the day of its 10th anniversary on the Red Planet, Opportunity is examining the rim of the Endeavour Crater. It has driven 24 miles (38.7 kilometers) from where it landed on Jan. 24, 2004. The site is about halfway around the planet from NASA's latest Mars rover, Curiosity.

Special products for the 10th anniversary of the twin rovers' landings, including a gallery of selected images, are available online at:http://mars.nasa.gov/mer10/ For more information about Spirit and Opportunity, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers


read more at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/m/news/news.php ... e=2014-022

CSIRO: Sensors tell the story of Mars

Paulo de Souza writes:

Ten years ago, NASA’s twin sister Rovers – dubbed Spirit and Opportunity – bounced to daunting air-cushioned landings on opposite sides of the Red Planet for what was planned to be just three-month missions.

This month (January 2014) Opportunity celebrates a truly remarkable achievement, a 10th anniversary of continued exploration of the cold surface of Mars. She is way beyond ‘warranty’. Opportunity is older than many of the cars we drive on Earth and there’s no roadside assistance to help her out!   It’s been great to be able to tell people my insider story of a full decade of exploration of Mars with Opportunity — my work on the Rover program and, in particular, the sensors on Opportunity. These miniaturised advanced sensors are for analysing Mars’ sandy and rocky surface. Creating them has been my work.
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We want to answer questions such as: Was Mars water fresh or salty? How acidic was it? Did it change over time or was its chemical composition constant? Could it have supported life? Where did it come from and where did it go? We’ve yet to find fossils that show us life existed on Mars. But that might be just around the corner … if the Rovers keep roving on.

Today we’re using similar sensors to those on the Mars Rovers on our CSIRO automated underwater vehicles (AUVs) to analyse water in Hobart’s Derwent River, Brisbane’s Moreton Bay and on the Great Barrier Reef. Just as on Mars, sensors can tell us a great deal about our Australian environment. In fact, you might be surprised to see just how connected we Aussies are to Mars.


read more at:
http://csirouniverseblog.com/2014/01/24 ... y-of-mars/

http://www.universetoday.com/108412/opportunity-discovers-that-oldest-rocks-reveal-best-chance-for-martian-life/ wrote:
Opportunity Discovers That Oldest Rocks Reveal Best Chance for Martian Life
by Ken Kremer, Universe Today, January 23, 2014

[b][color=#0000FF]Pancam false-color view acquired on Sol 3066 (Sept. 8 2012) of fine-scale layering in the Whitewater Lake locality that is indicative of an ancient aqueous environment on Mars. Veneers have been resistant to wind erosion and enhanced the layered appearance of the outcrop. Layers are typically several millimeters thick. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State University[/color][/b]

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<<After a decade of roving relentlessly on the Red Planet, NASA’s Opportunity rover discovered rocks that preserve the best evidence yet that ancient Mars was the most conducive time period for the formation of life on our Solar System’s most Earth-like Planet, according to the science leaders of the mission. Opportunity found the rocks – laden with clay minerals – barely over half a year ago in the spring of 2013, at an outcrop named ‘Whitewater Lake’ along an eroded segment of a vast crater named Endeavour that spans some 22 kilometers in diameter. “These rocks are older than any we examined earlier in the mission, and they reveal more favorable conditions for microbial life than any evidence previously examined by investigations with Opportunity,” says Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Opportunity investigated the rocks at a spot dubbed Matejivic Hill where researchers believe iron-rich smectite was produced in an aqueous environment some 4 billion years ago that was relatively benign with a nearly pH neutral – thus offering life a habitable zone with a far better chance to originate and thrive for perhaps as long as hundreds of millions of years. The new scientific findings are being published in the journal Science on Jan. 24, which just happens to exactly coincide with Opportunity’s landing on the Red Planet ten years ago at Meridiani Planum.

“The punch line here is that the oldest rocks Opportunity has examined were formed under very mild conditions — conditions that would have been a much better niche for life, and also much better for the preservation of organic materials that would have been produced,” said Arvidson at a NASA media briefing today, Jan. 23.

Immediately after landing on Mars on Jan.24, 2004 inside Eagle crater, the six wheeled robot found rocks within her eyesight that provided concrete evidence that eons ago Mars was much warmer and wetter compared to the cold, arid conditions that exist today. Although those sulfate rich rocks proved that liquid water once flowed on the surface of the Red Planet, they also stem from a time period with a rather harsh environment that was extremely acidic, containing significant levels of sulfuric acid that would not be friendly to the formation or sustainability of potential Martian life forms. “Evidence is thus preserved for water-rock interactions of the aqueous environments of slightly acidic to circum-neutral pH that would have been more favorable for prebiotic chemistry and microorganisms than those recorded by younger sulfate-rich rocks at Meridiani Planum,” Ardivson wrote in the Science paper, of which he is the lead author, along with many other team members.

The science team directed Opportunity to Matejivic Hill and the ‘Whitewater Lake’ area of outcrops based on predictions from spectral observations collected from the CRISM spectrometer aboard one of NASA’s spacecraft circling overhead the Red Planet – the powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Matejivic Hill is located on the Cape York rim segment of Endeavour crater. The long lived robot has been methodically exploring along the rim of Endeavour crater since arriving in August 2011.

Opportunity is currently investigating a new cache of clay mineral outcrops by the summit of Solander Point, a rim segment just south of Cape York and Matejivic Hill. These outcrops were likewise detected by the CRISM spectrometer aboard MRO. The combined discoveries from the golf cart sized Opportunity and the SUV sized Curiosity tell us that the presence of liquid water was widespread on ancient Mars.

Today marks Opportunity’s 3555th Sol or Martian Day roving Mars – for what was expected to be only a 90 Sol mission. So far she has snapped over 188,200 amazing images on the first overland expedition across the Red Planet. Her total odometry stands at over 24.07 miles (38.73 kilometers) since touchdown on Jan. 24, 2004 at Meridiani Planum.>>

Washington University in St Louis:
Mission scientist Ray Arvidson delivers whirlwind tour of rover’s 10 years of adventures, discoveries

Ten years ago, on Jan. 24, 2004, the Opportunity rover landed on a flat plain in the southern highlands of the planet Mars and rolled into an impact crater scientists didn’t even know existed.

The mission team, understandable giddy that it hadn’t crashed or mysteriously gone silent during the descent (as other Mars missions have done) called it “a hole in one.”

In honor of the rover’s 10th anniversary, Ray Arvidson, PhD, deputy principal investigator of the dual-rover mission, recently took an audience at Washington University in St. Louis on a whirlwind tour of the past decade’s exploration of Mars, cheered on by students holding signs reading “Boffins.” (“Boffin” is British slang for “scientist.”)

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Arvidson had a good story to tell. The 10-year-old rover, dirty and arthritic though it may be, just found evidence of conditions that would support the chemistry of life in the planet’s past, work that earned it a spot in the Jan. 24 issue of Science magazine, just in time for Opportunity’s anniversary.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

"The rovers are really field geologists,” Arvidson said. “They’re robotically driven, but they’re doing what we would be doing if we had boots on Mars with rock hammers, collection bags, microscopes and little huts where we could do some chemical analyses.

“What people don’t realize is that on any given day, in the afternoon Mars time, when the data come down through the Deep Space Net, we get just 100 to 200 megabits. That’s a soda straw, not a fire hose. So we have to be really careful about what we command and prioritize what we acquire.

“But operating at 100 to 200 megabits per sol, we’ve attempted to reconstruct the past environment from the geologic record just as a field geologist would do. (Sols, or Martian days, are 39 minutes longer than Earth days.)

“We lost Spirit, Opportunity’s twin, back in 2010,” Arvidson said. Stuck in the sand, it was unable to point its solar arrays in the correct direction to survive winter, and it went quiet March 22, 2010, or sol 2,210.

But Arvidson is not complaining; the rovers were expected to survive only about 90 to 180 sols. “They were supposed to last three or six months and it’s been 10 years,” he said. “They were supposed to drive maybe a thousand meters, and Opportunity is now about to break 40,000 meters.”

It is true that time has taken its toll. “In rover years, Opportunity’s about 300 years old,” Arvidson joked.

Read more at: https://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/26400.aspx