Opportunity Travels More Than 30 kilometers On Mars

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity has recently reached an impressive milestone on the surface of the Red Planet, After traveling 146.8 meters (482 feet) in a single drive, it manage to exceed 30 kilometers of trekking on Mars. That is the equivalent of 18.64 miles.

The robot covered this distance in more than 88 months of operations on our neighboring planet. It arrived at Mars on January 25, 2004, for a three-month mission. It was originally supposed to drive only a few hundred feet, but then it kept on going, and mission controllers followed suit.

This is what brought the machine and its team to their most recent success. The impressive milestone that was reached on June 1 marks the fact that Opportunity traveled more than 50 times the distance that was planned for it.

Over the past few weeks, the rover also had an encounter with a small crater, which mission controllers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, informally called Skylab.

This is the name of the first American-built space station. The crater itself is about 9 meters (30 feet) in diameter, investigators say, and is of little interest to the rover, which is currently heading towards Endeavour crater.

Opportunity passed by Skylab about two weeks ago, and it snapped a few images of the landscape feature and its ejecta material on May 12. The crater was most likely produced by a small impactor that made its way to the Martian surface.

According to analysis of the images, the impact occurred some 100,000 years ago, which is relatively recent in geological terms. Under normal circumstances, the rover would have stopped to visit it, but it is heading towards Endeavour at full speed.

The feature is an impact crater some 22 kilometers (14 miles) in diameter, which promises to provide a fresh, new insight into Martian geology. It was most likely produced by a giant impactor, so it must have penetrated the surface of a planet very deeply.

As such, it most likely exposed numerous rock layers, that will give Opportunity a clear view into how the planet's geology evolved over time. The new data may finally be able to establish whether liquid water flowed on the surface of Mars in the distant past.