Opportunity traverse on Meridiani Planum

Opportunity · 2004 CE – 2018 CE · Mars

Opportunity traverse on Meridiani Planum — Opportunity · 2004 CE – 2018 CE · Mars — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Read the layered rock of a plain where orbiters had detected haematite.

Historical context

Meridiani Planum was chosen because Mars Global Surveyor had found grey hematite there, a mineral that usually forms in water. Opportunity landed inside a small crater with layered bedrock within reach, then spent fourteen years driving south and east across the plain to Endeavour crater and along its rim. It stopped only when a planet-encircling dust storm took away its sunlight in June 2018.

The voyage, step by step

  1. A hole in one

    25 January 2004

    Opportunity touched down on Meridiani Planum at 04:54 Universal Time on 25 January 2004, by NASA’s archive, bounced 26 times, rolled about 200 m and came to rest inside a crater twenty-two metres wide, with pale layered bedrock exposed in its wall within ten metres of the rover.

  2. Down into Endurance

    2004 CE

    After a six-week drive of about 800 metres, Opportunity reached Endurance, a stadium-sized crater 130 m across and more than twenty metres deep. In June 2004 it drove in, and it spent more than six months reading the layers of its walls.

  3. Blueberries

    2005 CE

    Driving south in 2005 over plains strewn with millimetre spheres of grey haematite, weathered out of the bedrock beneath, Opportunity ran into a sand ripple on 26 April and took more than five weeks to get free.

  4. The cliffs of Victoria

    26 September 2006

    On sol 951, 26 September 2006, after a twenty-one-month journey and more than nine kilometres of driving, Opportunity reached Duck Bay on the scalloped rim of Victoria, a crater about 750 m wide and 75 metres deep some six kilometres south of its landing site, and looked at cliffs of layered rock.

  5. Spirit Point

    9 August 2011

    On 9 August 2011, after a trek of about twenty-one kilometres from Victoria lasting nearly three years, Opportunity arrived at Spirit Point on the western rim of Endeavour, a crater twenty-two kilometres across.

  6. Older, gentler water

    2013 CE

    In the spring of 2013, on Matijevic Hill at Cape York, Opportunity ground into a pale, fractured rock about the size of a forearm, called Esperance. Its make-up was unlike any the rover had met in nine years, richer in aluminium and silica and poorer in calcium and iron, which pointed to clay minerals.

  7. A marathon

    24 March 2015

    On 24 March 2015, with a drive of 46.5 metres as it neared Marathon Valley, Opportunity’s odometer passed 42.195 km, the length of a marathon, eleven years and two months after landing.

  8. Night in Perseverance Valley

    10 June 2018

    A dust storm first seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on 30 May 2018 darkened the sky over Perseverance Valley. Opportunity’s last transmission, on sol 5111, 10 June, reported a dust opacity, or tau, of 10.8, against about 0.5 on an ordinary day there, and very little power left.

Outcome

45.16 km driven from Eagle crater to the rim of Endeavour, with evidence that shallow water once stood and flowed at Meridiani.

Opportunity

Rover that worked more than fourteen years on Meridiani Planum and drove 45.16 km, farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world by NASA’s count.

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Sources

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