This movie clip shows a dust devil growing in size and blowing across the plain inside Gusev Crater. The clip consists of frames that Spirit took with her Navigation Camera on the morning of the rover's 496th Martian day or sol (May 26, 2005). Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust moved by wind.
Following her discoveries on Matijevic Hill, Opportunity headed onward in late spring 2013, driving through Botany Bay to another section of Endeavour’s rim dubbed Solander Point. From there, the rover continued south toward Cape Tribulation, imaging Murray Ridge, named for Bruce Murray, Planetary Society Co-Founder and former JPL Director in 2014, and various other geological features, before heading on to Marathon Valley, where CRISM picked up a mother lode of signatures for phyllosilicates.
On March 24, 2015, after spending several weeks investigating some new rock types along the western rim of Endeavour Crater, Opportunity, closing in on Marathon Valley, cruised past 42.2 kilometers (26.2 miles) to finish the first off-Earth marathon and drive the mission back into the space history books. "This is the first time any human enterprise has exceeded the distance of a marathon on the surface of another world," Callas announced in the NASA-JPL press release.
Working on Mars, however, was becoming challenging as Opportunity began suffering increasing ‘amnesia’ events, episodes when she failed to write or ‘save’ her science and telemetry data to her non-volatile, long-term memory or Flash drive. Worse, she had been experiencing sudden reboots or re-sets. The ops engineers had tried a number of things, eventually having the rover mask off one of Flash’s 8 data banks, confident it was corrupted and may be causing the problems. It didn’t work.
Out of options, the rover’s Flash was taken out of commission in May 2015 and Opportunity was configured to operate in RAM-only mode. Working in RAM, which is volatile memory, meant the rover would have to send each day’s work to the Mars Odyssey or MRO for downlinking to Earth before she shut down for the night or the data would not be saved or, in other words, gone. This mode would slow the pace of research but the team and its rover would adapt and persevere.
After checking out outcrops and a strange cairn-like stack of rocks named for aviation pioneer Charles A. Lindbergh just outside the entryway to Marathon Valley, the rover finally drove into Marathon Valley in July 2015. The rover spent a little more than a year conducting close-up studies of outcrops and rocks and soils, ultimately finding the phyllosilicates were everywhere, in the soils and rocks, ubiquitous but not obvious like they had been on Matijevic Hill.
