The gold line on the image on the left shows Opportunity's route from the Eagle Crater landing site to Marathon Valley, not too far from her current location in Perseverance Valley. The MER mission has been exploring the western rim of Endeavour Crater since August 2011.The base image for the map is a mosaic of images taken by the Context Camera onboard the MRO. Larry Crumpler, of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, provided the route add-on. The image on the right shows the rover’s traverse to Marathon Valley, mapped by JPL’s Tim Parker onto an image from the HiRISE camera onboard MRO.
Mars is still the planet Earthlings love the most and its proximity and possibilities for human explorers give it the most drawing power. With Elon Musk’s Space X, as well as NASA aiming to send humans to the Red Planet, Mars, is as popular as it’s ever been. A lot of the current wanderlust is because of Spirit and Opportunity, because they have taken us there.
A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying goes, and the twin robot field geologists took pictures every rove of the way, over every Martian hill and every Martian dale, up every hill, and down every crater as they blazed humanity’s first trails up there. And Opportunity is still truckin’.
“Every year we have this conversation, and each year I’m incrementally more astonished than I was the year before,” said Squyres. “Incrementally, because I know what a good machine this is and I know what a good team is. If we’re fortunate and things go well, I’ll be a little more surprised this time next year,” he said, pausing. “It really is remarkable and it’s a joyful thing to continue to be part of.”
