Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
NASA has delayed the Opportunity rover’s voyage to the region of Mars known as Marathon Valley to send it to a nearby overlook that is home to unusual-looking rocks unlike anything that scientists had ever previously encountered on the Red Planet.
Marathon Valley, which Discovery News explained was named because Opportunity will have travelled the distance of a marathon (26 miles and 385 yards; 42.195 kilometers) once it reaches that location, was less than 130 meters away when the rocks caught NASA’s attention.
This map updates progress that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is making toward reaching a driving distance equivalent to a marathon footrace. It indicates the rover's position on March 5, 2015, relative to where it could surpass that distance. (Credit: NASA/JPL)
“We drove to the edge of a plateau to look down in the valley, and we found these big, dark-gray blocks along the ridgeline,” Opportunity Project Scientist Matt Golombek, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “We checked one and found its composition is different from any ever measured before on Mars.”
[VIDEO: 11 years and counting – Opportunity on Mars]
The first rock analyzed at the site was found to have relatively high concentrations of aluminum and silicon, as well an overall composition that had not previously been found by Opportunity or its twin rover, Spirit, the US space agency explained. The rock was examined by the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer instrument located on the end of the rover’s robotic arm.
Opportunity will now go examine a second target rock, and while the rocks are gray in color, the visible-light spectrum of the first contained more purple than most Mars rocks. Similarly, the spectrum of the second rock type was found to have more blue, and of the two, the rocks that are bluer in color tend to rest higher upon the ridge, NASA scientists explained.
No more amnesia for this rover
Upon completion of Opportunity’s analysis, the rover received new software uploaded to its computer by the mission team. That patch, Discovery News explains, includes instruction telling the rover to avoid writing data to a corrupt portion of its flash memory. Opportunity will now be writing data to six of its seven banks in the hopes that its “amnesia events” can be corrected.
The rover has been running in “no flash mode” since late last year, the website added, and has relied solely upon its volatile memory, which is erased every day. The lack of flash memory and the resulting rover resets have slowed Opportunity’s progress in recent months, but engineers are hopeful that the upgrade will allow the veteran rover to overcome these issues.
[STORY: Mars Opportunity rover sets new record]
“The rover is using the new software, but a memory reformatting will be needed before resuming use of flash memory,” JPL said, adding that they plan to “avoid use of the rover’s arm for several days” after reformatting in order to ensure that “the flash file system is fixed and no longer causes resets. A reset during the use of the rover’s arm would require a complex recovery effort.”
Opportunity, which landed on Mars’ Meridiani Planum in January 2004, had a primary mission of just three months. However, it remains operational and, despite its age-related computer woes, it has travelled a total of 26.139 miles (42.067 kilometers) during the past 11 years and continues analyzing the geology of the rim around Endeavor Creator, Discovery News added.
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