The Mars rover known as Opportunity has caught a glimpse of the Endeavour crater and is now less than a football field's distance away from the rim.
Reaching the rim of Endeavour has been a long-term goal of the Mars rover team since August 2008, when Opportunity left the Victoria crater, which it had been exploring for two years. Endeavour, however, is more than 25 times wider than Victoria at 14 miles in diameter. Opportunity is scheduled to arrive at a section of the crater's rim known as "Spirit Point" on the western side of Endeavour in the coming days.
"Observations by orbiting spacecraft indicate that the ridges along Endeavour's western rim expose rock outcrops older than any Opportunity has seen so far," NASA said.
Opportunity and its now defunct sibling, Spirit, completed a scheduled, three-month tour of Mars in August 2004 but have remained on the Red Planet for years in a series of bonus missions. Both vehicles have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that might have supported microbial life. Spirit, however, did not survive its last Martian winter; it last communicated with the rover team on March 22, 2010 after driving 4.8 miles, more than 12 times its original goal.
Now, after a 13.45-mile journey, Opportunity is approaching its latest target. Why did it take so long? NASA said the drive included an autonomous hazard detection portion during which the rover paused at intervals to check for obstacles before proceeding.
"Autonomous hazard detection has added a significant portion of the driving distance over the past few months. It lets us squeeze 10 to 15 percent more distance into each drive," Alfonso Herrera, a rover mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
Another technique to extend the life of Opportunity is driving backwards, which preserves the life of a motor in a right-front wheel that sometimes draws more current than the other five wheels' drive motors.
"Opportunity has an arthritic shoulder joint on her robotic arm and is a little lame in the right front wheel, but she is otherwise doing remarkably well after seven years on Mars, more like 70 in 'rover years,'" Bill Nelson, chief of the mission's engineering team, said last month. "The elevated right front wheel current is a concern, but a combination of heating and backwards driving has kept it in check over the past 2,000-plus sols," or Martian days.
Earlier this month, data gathered from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggested the possibility of flowing water on the Red Planet during the warmest months of the year. Also this month, Elon Musk, CEO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) discussed his dream of colonies on Mars and other planets. "Ultimately, the thing that is super important in the grand scale of history is—are we on a path to becoming a multi-planet species or not? If we’re not, that’s not a very bright future. We’ll just be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us," Musk said.

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