PASADENA >> The Opportunity Mars rover broke a world record this month when, after 10.5 years, its odometer read 25 miles, NASA announced Monday.
Opportunity’s mission when it landed on Jan. 26, 2004, was to survive three months and travel .62 miles. It had orders to sample the geology on Mars and determine its past habitability. The space rover has gone 40 times above and beyond NASA’s expectations, said John Callas, Mars exploration rover project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“We have made some really profound discoveries of this other world,” he said. “We are exploring for the benefit of all humankind as evidenced by as soon as we get the pictures, we share them with the world. This is really a human accomplishment — our aspirations as humans to explore and discover.”
Launched on July 7, 2003, Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004. As a single-string rover, it doesn’t have any electronic redundancies. So if something goes haywire, that’s the end of that function.
The Mars Exploration Rover Project is part of NASA’s plan to help produce a human mission on the Red Planet in the 2030s.
Scientists cannot predict how much longer Opportunity will last because it’s so far past its design life, Callas said. On its 10th birthday, Opportunity had some degraded components: problems with its front-right wheel, some arthritis on its robotic arms and two out-of-commission scientific instruments. The rover has returned more than 187,000 raw images.
Its twin rover, Spirit, went out of commission in March 2010 after six years, 4.8 miles and about 128,000 raw images, according to the Mars Exploration website .
The former Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover held the previous off-Earth roving distance record. It traveled 24.2 miles in less than five months, according to NASA.
The Soviet Union’s two Lunokhod missions to the moon were part of “the first golden age of planetary exploration, the 1960s and ‘70s,” said Steve Squyres, principal investigator for NASA’s twin Mars rovers, in a statement.
“We’re in a second golden age now, and what we’ve tried to do on Mars with Spirit and Opportunity has been very much inspired by the accomplishments of the Lunokhod team on the moon so many years ago,” Squyres said in a statement.
Opportunity traveled 20 miles before it arrived at Endeavour Crater in 2011, where it found clay and sulfate-bearing mineral outcrops along the crater’s rim. The clay proves drinkable water existed in Mars’ ancient past, and this liquid persisted for a long time, Callas said.
Because of the observed existence of ancient water, scientists believe the Red Planet once had less acidic, thicker atmosphere and more mild temperatures, Callas said. In short, it was probably more earth-like, he said.
If the rover could survive the distance of a marathon, 26.2 miles, it will approach the next major investigation site mission, “Marathon Valley,” where a “motherload of clay minerals” wait to be discovered, Callas said. Spacecraft orbiting Mars have produced images that suggest the steep slopes there may reveal a clear relationship between the different clay layers.
