14 DAY TRIAL // While Curiosity is getting most of the attention these days, there's another rover on Mars which is doing some amazing things of its own. The Opportunity rover is getting close to its 10-year anniversary on the planet.
Since landing on the Red Planet, Opportunity has made some significant discoveries, ironically perhaps, some of the biggest coming in the past few months, after the bigger and better equipped Curiosity had landed.
Like Curiosity, the Opportunity rover found conditions greatly favorable to life in one location on the planet. There, billions of years ago, the water was cleaner and purer than in many places on Earth today.
Opportunity has made some other accomplishments as well, like breaking the record for the longest off-planet drive, at least as far as NASA vehicles are concerned.
The small rover recently overtook the record set by the Lunar Roving Vehicle back in 1972 during the Apollo 17 mission.
But Opportunity still has some way to go before breaking the overall record, still held by the Russian Lunokhod 2 rover.
The original distance traveled by the Russian vehicle is about 37 kilometers, which Opportunity is very close to. But new data suggests that the distance traveled by the Russian moon rover is closer to 42 kilometers.
Still, Opportunity has plenty to celebrate as it gets close to the 10-year mark since its launch, on July 7, 2003.