NASA Mars Exploration Rover Team to be Honored

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwane.c.brown@nasa.gov

News release: 2012-280 Sept. 7, 2012

NASA Mars Exploration Rover Team to be Honored

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-280&cid=release_2012-280

PASADENA, Calif. -- The mission team for NASA's long-lived Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit
and Opportunity will be awarded the Haley Space Flight Award. The team will receive the award
Sept. 12 during the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Space 2012
Conference and Exposition in Pasadena, Calif.

The award is presented for outstanding contributions by an astronaut or flight test personnel to
the advancement of the art, science or technology of astronautics. Past recipients include Alan
Shepherd, John Glenn, Thomas Stafford, Robert Crippen, Kathryn Sullivan and the crew of
space shuttle mission STS-125, which flew in 2009 on the last shuttle mission to NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope.

The award citation praises the rover project's "new techniques in extraterrestrial robotic system
operations to explore another world and extend mission lifetime." Mars Exploration Rover
Project Manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, will accept the
award for the team.

"On behalf of the many hundreds of scientists and engineers who designed, built and operate
these rovers, it is a great honor to accept this most prestigious award," Callas said. "It is
especially gratifying that this comes right as Opportunity is conducting one of the most
significant campaigns in the eight-and-a-half years since landing. We still are going strong, with
perhaps the most exciting exploration still ahead."

In its eighth year operating on Mars, Opportunity is surveying a crater-rim outcrop of layered
rock in search of clay minerals that could provide new information about a formerly wet
environment. Spirit worked for more than six years -- until 2010 -- 24 times longer than its
original three-month prime mission.

In just the past two months, Opportunity has driven about a third of a mile (more than 525
meters), extending its total overland travel distance to 21.76 miles (35 kilometers). Recent drives
along the inner edge of the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater have
brought the rover close to a layered outcrop in an area where clay minerals have been detected
from orbit. These minerals could offer evidence of ancient, wet conditions with less acidity than
the ancient, wet environments recorded at sites Opportunity visited during its first seven years on
Mars.

Opportunity's position overlooking 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) Endeavour Crater is about
5,200 miles (8,400 kilometers) from where Curiosity, NASA's next-generation Mars rover,
landed inside Gale Crater a month ago.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars
Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about Opportunity and Spirit, visit http://www.nasa.gov/rovers and
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov . You can follow the project on Twitter and on Facebook at
http://twitter.com/MarsRovers and http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers .

-end-


To remove yourself from this mailing, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=5dJDIQOpF9IEIQMDH&s=lvJ4JaPRLhKQK9PXJvF&m=huLWI7NOJhJYIoI

To remove yourself from all mailings from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=aiINL5MJLeIPKXNOE&s=lvJ4JaPRLhKQK9PXJvF&m=huLWI7NOJhJYIoI