NASA Mars Rover Opportunity Ascends to Level Ground

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 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
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

NEWS RELEASE: 2008-168 August 29, 2008

NASA Mars Rover Opportunity Ascends to Level Ground

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has climbed out of
the large crater that it had been examining from the inside since last September.

"The rover is back on flat ground," an engineer who drives it, Paolo Bellutta of NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, announced to the mission's international team of scientists and
engineers.

Opportunity used its own entry tracks from nearly a year ago as the path for a drive of 6.8
meters (22 feet) bringing the rover out over the top of the inner slope and through a sand
ripple at the lip of Victoria Crater. The exit drive, conducted late Thursday, completed a
series of drives covering 50 meters (164 feet) since the rover team decided about a month
ago that it had completed its scientific investigations inside the crater.

"We're headed to the next adventure out on the plains of Meridiani," said JPL's John
Callas, project manager for Opportunity and its twin Mars rover, Spirit. "We safely got
into the crater, we completed our exploration there, and we safely got out. We were
concerned that any wheel failure on our aging rover could have left us trapped inside the
crater."

The Opportunity mission has focused on Victoria Crater for more than half of the 55
months since the rover landed in the Meridiani Planum region of equatorial Mars. The
crater spans about 800 meters (half a mile) in diameter and reveals rock layers that hold
clues to environmental conditions of the area through an extended period when the rocks
were formed and altered.

The team selected Victoria as the next major destination after Opportunity exited smaller
Endurance Crater in late 2004. The ensuing 22-month traverse to Victoria included
stopping for studies along the route and escaping from a sand trap. The rover first reached
the rim of Victoria in September 2007. For nearly a year, it then explored partway around
the rim, checking for the best entry route and examining from above the rock layers
exposed in a series of promontories that punctuate the crater perimeter.

Now that Opportunity has finished exploring Victoria Crater and returned to the
surrounding plain, the rover team plans to use tools on the robotic arm in coming months
to examine an assortment of cobbles -- rocks about fist-size and larger -- that may have
been thrown from impacts that dug craters too distant for Opportunity to reach.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the rovers
for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For images and information
about NASA's Opportunity and Spirit Mars rovers, visit http://www.nasa.gov/rovers
and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov .
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