Mars rover updates - Unparallel Lines Give Unparalleled Clues

Opportunity had a couple of little hiccups on sol 18, February 11, which ends at 7:01 p.m. Wednesday, PST. The wrist on the real rover arm would not point as far vertically as the engineering rover’s wrist did on Earth during a model test the night before. Because of this, the arm on Mars did not stow, and the rover did not move on to waypoint Charlie. The rover also automatically stopped use of the mast due to the fact that it believed a requested pointing position was in an area beyond its limits. Engineers solved both problems on sol 18. All systems are go for Opportunity to complete the tour of the outcrop by heading to outpost Charlie on sol 19, Thursday, February 12.

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On Spirit's sol 38, which ended at 6:40 a.m. Wednesday, PST, a failure to receive data during the morning high-gain communication window quickly led engineers to conclude that Spirit’s high-gain antenna was not pointed toward Earth. Spirit’s orientation after the previous sol's drive (45 degrees to the northeast) caused its camera mast to cast an early-morning shadow on the high-gain antenna’s elevation actuator. The cold conditions caused the actuator to stall and fail to point to Earth while being calibrated. The afternoon high-gain communication session performed flawlessly.

The afternoon communication window with Mars Odyssey provided previously acquired images of the rocks Adirondack and White Boat and a miniature thermal emission spectrometer observation of the depression drilled by the rock abrasion tool on Adirondack.

In coming sols Spirit will perform daily "touch and go" maneuvers, inspecting the soil surrounding it with the instruments on its arm, then continuing its drive toward the crater nicknamed "Bonneville."

re #2 . . .

Opportunity's Path

This Long Term Planning graphic was created from a mosaic of navigation camera images overlain by a polar coordinate grid with the center point as Opportunity's original landing site. The blue dots represent the rover position at various locations.

The red dots represent the center points of the target areas for the instruments on the rover mast (the panoramic camera and miniature thermal emission spectrometer). Opportunity visited Stone Mountain on Feb. 5. Stone Mountain was named after the southernmost point of the Appalachian Mountains outside of Atlanta, Ga. On Earth, Stone Mountain is the last big mountain before the Piedmont flatlands, and on Mars, Stone Mountain is at one end of Opportunity Ledge. El Capitan is a target of interest on Mars named after the second highest peak in Texas in Guadaloupe National Park, which is one of the most visited outcrops in the United States by geologists. It has been a training ground for students and professional geologists to understand what the layering means in relation to the formation of Earth, and scientists will study this prominent point of Opportunity Ledge to understand what the layering means on Mars.

The yellow lines show the midpoint where the panoramic camera has swept and will sweep a 120-degree area from the three waypoints on the tour of the outcrop. Imagine a fan-shaped wedge from left to right of the yellow line.

The white contour lines are one meter apart, and each drive has been roughly about 2-3 meters in length over the last few sols. The large white blocks are dropouts in the navigation camera data.

Opportunity is driving along and taking a photographic panorama of the entire outcrop. Scientists will stitch together these images and use the new mosaic as a "base map" to decide on geology targets of interest for a more detailed study of the outcrop using the instruments on the robotic arm. Once scientists choose their targets of interest, they plan to study the outcrop for roughly five to fifteen sols. This will include El Capitan and probably one to two other areas.

Image created by John Grotzinger and the Long Term Planning Team.

Blue Dot Dates
Sol 7 / Jan 31 = Egress & first soil data collected by instruments on the arm
Sol 9 / Feb 2 = Second Soil Target
Sol 12 / Feb 5 = First Rock Target
Sol 16 / Feb 9 = Alpha Waypoint
Sol 17 / Feb 10 = Bravo Waypoint
Sol 19 or 20 / Feb 12 or 13 = Charlie Waypoint

RE #4 . . .

Unparallel Lines Give Unparalleled Clues

Scientists are excited to see new details of layered rocks in Opportunity Ledge. In previous panoramic camera images, geologists saw that some rocks in the outcrop had thin layers, and images sent to Earth on sol 17 (Feb. 10, 2004) now show that the thin layers are not always parallel to each other like lines on notebook paper. Instead, if you look closely at this image from an angle, you will notice that the lines converge and diverge at low angles. These unparallel lines give unparalleled clues that some "moving current" such as volcanic flow, wind, or water formed these rocks. These layers with converging and diverging lines are a significant discovery for scientists who are on route to rigorously test the water hypothesis. The main task for both rovers in coming weeks and months is to explore the areas around their landing sites for evidence in rocks and soils about whether those areas ever had environments that were watery and possibly suitable for sustaining life.

This is a cropped image taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera on sol 16 (Feb. 9, 2004). JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

There are no crustal plates floating on a magma sea on Mars, so volcanoes stay over their hotspots and grow to colossal sizes (Olympus Mons is about the size of France).

You don't need tectonics to have vulcanism. Vulcanism can be thought of as a gradient heat-flow process, whereby heat left over from the planet's formation in the interior is "flowing downhill" to the cold of outer space. On a planet like earth that results in convection currents in the magma which push the continental plates around, and the rising plumes create "hotspots" like Hawaii and Yellowstone. Mars has such hotspots, but no tectonics that we know of.

You can have faults too, if the crust is pushed up enough it will split and rupture, like Vallis Marineris.

I am not a geologist, this is just a layman's understanding.

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