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Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov
Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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Rachel Hoover 650-604-0643
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
rachel.hoover@nasa.gov
News release: 2010-420 Dec. 16, 2010
NASA Spacecraft Provides Travel Tips for Mars Rover
The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-420&cid=release_2010-420
SAN FRANCISCO -- NASA's Mars Opportunity rover is getting important tips from an orbiting
spacecraft as it explores areas that might hold clues about past Martian environments.
Researchers are using a mineral-mapping instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to
help the rover investigate a large ancient crater called Endeavour. The orbiter's Compact
Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) is providing maps of minerals at
Endeavour's rim that are helping the team choose which area to explore first and where to go from
there. As Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter orbits more than 241 kilometers high (150 miles), the CRISM
instrument provides mapping information for mineral exposures on the surface as small as a tennis
court.
"This is the first time mineral detections from orbit are being used in tactical decisions about where
to drive on Mars," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis. Arvidson is the deputy
principal investigator for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers and a co-investigator for CRISM.
Opportunity's science team chose to begin driving the rover toward the 22.5-kilometer-wide (14-
mile-wide) crater in 2008, after four years studying other sites in what initially was planned as a
three-month mission. The rover has traveled approximately nine miles since setting out for
Endeavour crater. It will take several months to reach it.
The team plans for Opportunity's exploration of Endeavour to begin at a rim fragment called Cape
York. That feature is too low to be visible by the rover, but appears from orbit to be nearly
surrounded by water-bearing minerals. The planned route then turns southward toward a higher rim
fragment called Cape Tribulation, where CRISM has detected a class of clay minerals not
investigated yet by a ground mission. Spacecraft orbiting Mars found these minerals to be
widespread on the planet. The presence of clay minerals at Endeavour suggests an earlier and milder
wet environment than the very acidic, wet one indicated by previous evidence found by
Opportunity.
"We used to have a disconnect between the scale of identifying minerals from orbit and what
missions on the surface could examine," said CRISM team member Janice Bishop of NASA's Ames
Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and the SETI Institute of Mountain View, Calif. "Now,
rovers are driving farther and orbital footprints are getting smaller."
Ten years ago, an imaging spectrometer on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter found an
Oklahoma-sized area with a type of the mineral hematite exposed. This discovery motivated
selection of the area as Opportunity's 2004 landing site. Each pixel footprint for that spectrometer
was 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) across. CRISM resolves areas about 18 meters (60 feet) across. Last fall,
the instrument began using a pixel-overlap technique that provided even better resolution.
Opportunity has just reached a 90-meter-diameter crater (300-foot) called Santa Maria, where
CRISM detected a patch of ground with indications of water bound into the mineral. Opportunity
will conduct a science campaign at the crater for the next several weeks to compare the ground
results to the orbital indications.
"Opportunity has driven farther in the past Martian year than in any previous one," said John Callas,
Mars Exploration Rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
A Martian year lasts approximately 23 months. During the past Martian year, Opportunity covered
more than 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) of the mission's 26 total kilometers (16 miles) traveled since it
landed in January 2004. The rover has returned more than 141,000 images.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reached the Red Planet in 2006 to begin a two-year primary science
mission. Its data show Mars had diverse wet environments at many locations for differing durations
during the planet's history, and climate-change cycles persist into the present era. The mission has
returned more planetary data than all other Mars missions combined.
JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rovers and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.,
manages CRISM.
For more information about Mars missions, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars .
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