Artist's conception of a Mars Exploration Rover, which included Opportunity and Spirit. Credit: NASA
The Opportunity Mars rover is busy on its wheels as it moves towards “Marathon Valley”, a location that could include clay minerals — a sign of past water in the region. After successfully passing 41 kilometers (25.47 miles) in total driving a few weeks ago, the rover is closing out its 11th year on Mars with guided and unguided drives towards that destination.
As of late November, the latest status update available from NASA, the rover is just about a half-mile (1 kilometer) from Marathon Valley and busy collecting measurements on an interesting geologic feature en route. This followed several hundred feet of driving that took place just before.
The rover is now racing to finish its work as the Martian winter approaches. Its science activities are still being disrupted by rover difficulties, according to the Planetary Society, which follows weeks of memory problems that have plagued Opportunity through the fall. But Opportunity is still trekking despite these aging issues and transmitting raw imagery from the surface of Mars, which you can see below.
Private and military organizations are tracking some of the 170 million pieces of space junk…
Astronomers know of about 60 rocky exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars.…
Famous Halley’s Comet reaches a distant milestone this coming weekend.
If nothing else catches your attention in the title then surely ‘hypernebula’ does! There are…
Scientists love outliers. Outliers are nature's way of telling us what its boundaries are and…
Planet Earth is full of some truly awe-inspiring spectacles, but few are as intriguing as…