Opportunity was superimposed on this image as an artist’s concept of what the rover looks like on the rim of Victoria Crater at Cape Verde. It was produced to give a sense of scale.
As the dust storm began to dissipate, Spirit checked off her 1,282nd sol on August 11, 2007 and became the second longest working lander on the surface of Mars. She surpassed the longevity of the Viking 2 lander, which was powered by a nuclear cell. Spirit, of course, was primarily powered by the Sun. The Viking 1 lander, which had logged 2,245 sols of operation, was now in her sights.
By September 2007, Opportunity had shaken off the dust best she could and was ready to begin that detailed study inside Victoria Crater. “The most stressful, memorable moment was Sol 1291 (September 11, 2007) when we did the toe-dip into Victoria,” said Rover Planner Paolo Bellutta, who had been assigned the tasks of defining and charting the best entry and egress points. He had collected imagery and analyzed telemetry for months, but still he was anxious. This was, after all, a rover on Mars.
After Bellutta reviewed his crater entry plan at the Science Operations Working Group (SOWG) meeting, Squyres asked simply and directly: “Are you sure?"
“I don't think I have been that nervous before,” Bellutta recalled. “But I trusted all my work, so I said ‘yes.’” And the command to make the toe-dip was sent off to Opportunity.
That night, Bellutta had a weird, kind of back-to-the-future nightmare. A child and his father were visiting Duck Bay on Mars. As they peered into the crater, the child turned to his dad and asked: “So why did they go down here?"
Out of Dreamland and back to reality, the answer of course was simple: to explore. And that’s what Opportunity would spend the next year doing, examining the various strata inside the crater. The MER scientists identified three distinct strata that show compositional trends with depth, similar (but with some differences in detail) to what the rover found in Endurance crater, showing that water-induced alteration was regional in scope in Meridiani. They also found that the layering in the crater wall preserves evidence of ancient wind-blown dunes.
On Earth, the MER ops team scored another historical first of its own, years before the “watershed moment” of 2017-2018 – and no one was ever trying for this achievement. On February 22, 2008, the entire tactical operations team for the mission, both onsite at JPL and offsite at remote institutions, was female. And it wasn’t planned. It just happened as a result of scheduling. "It was fabulous," said MER Mission Manager software engineer Cindy Oda then. "You know the joke about women drivers. Well, now women are driving on Mars, commanding rovers."
With some final imaging of Cape Verde, one of the promontories that forms Victoria’s rim, Opportunity’s work inside the crater was deemed complete and the rover made its exit. In September, NASA and the MER team announced this rover’s next destination: a giant crater to the southeast. At 22-kilometers (13.7-miles) in diameter and 300 meters (984 feet) deep, it is more than 20 times larger than Victoria Crater, “staggeringly large compared to anything we've seen before," as Squyres put it. The team named it Endeavour after HMS Endeavour, Lieutenant James Cook’s British Royal Navy research vessel.
It was a hugely ambitious goal, especially given that Opportunity was 4 years and 8 months into a mission originally "warrantied" for 3 months and the distance from Victoria to Endeavour is slightly more than the distance the rover had traveled since landing in Eagle Crater. For some outsiders, it seemed preposterous, even for a rover that loves to rove. "We may not get there," Squyres admitted then. "But it is scientifically the right direction to go anyway."
Just days after the announcement, on Sol 1662 (September 26, 2008), Opportunity officially began her incredible journey that would take her about 12 kilometers (about 7.5 miles) to the southeast across the plains and farther back in Martian time.
