Skip to footer

Martian marathon: Watch Opportunity rove across alien terrain

A new video released by NASA shows images taken by the rover Opportunity between January 2004 and April 2015, covering a total distance of 26.2 miles.

You can now see what it would be like to run a marathon on Mars, thanks to a new time-lapse video captured by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

The images shown in the video were taken by cameras on the rover between January 2004 and April 2015, as Opportunity traveled 26.2 miles from its original landing location inside a crater on a flat plain known as Meridiani Planum.

Opportunity is the longest-running Mars rover. Its mission was originally intended to last 90 Sols (a Sol, one Martian day, is 24 hours and 37 minutes), but it’s still roaming the Red Planet 11 years later.

The 384-pound rover has multiple cameras: a panoramic camera, a navigational camera, and a microscopic imager, which can take high-resolution close-up images of rocks and soils.

Opportunity also has several instruments for analyzing composition and mineralogy, including a miniature thermal emission spectrometer, an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, and a rock abrasion tool that exposes fresh material underneath the dust and weathered rinds that coat most Martian rocks.

Over the course of its documented journey, Opportunity has explored two large craters, Victoria and Endeavour, and found multiple signs of water. It also managed to survive several potentially hazardous situations, including an encounter with a sand trap and a bad dust storm.

In July 2014, Opportunity broke an off-world driving record when it hit 25.01 miles, surpassing the previous record set by the Soviet Union’s remote-controlled lunar Lunokhod 2 rover on the moon in 1973.

The Mars Exploration Rover Project, NASA's newer Curiosity Mars rover, and three active NASA Mars orbiters are all part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, which aims to better understand Mars as a dynamic system by studying its environments, climate cycles, geology, and biological potential.

NASA is also currently developing the human spaceflight capabilities needed for a journey to Mars. Some scientists suggest that NASA could get astronauts to orbit Mars by 2033 and onto the Red Planet's surface by 2039.

[Editor's note: The original story misidentified the NASA rover in the headline]

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Martian marathon: Watch Opportunity rove across alien terrain
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Science-Notebook/2015/0708/Martian-marathon-Watch-Opportunity-rove-across-alien-terrain
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe