back to article Mars rover sets sights on distant crater

NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity is about to set off on what may be its final odyssey - a seven-mile (11.3 km) jaunt to a crater around 20 times larger than the Victoria Crater from which it extricated itself earlier this month. The distant feature, dubbed Endeavour, is 13.7 miles (22 km) across and 1,000 ft (300m) deep. It's …

COMMENTS

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  1. ChessGeek

    Go Get 'Em, Rover

    Keep on trucking, little dude.

  2. Andrew Norris
    Boffin

    2 years travel?

    At 110 yards a day, I get a travel time of only 112 days. That is about 1/6 of a martian year. Now while the rover is indeed a government "worker" it can't be THAT slow..

  3. Stuart
    Paris Hilton

    Surley

    These old men should be put out to stud.

  4. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Opportunity's successors:

    How about Means and Motive?

    And while we are at it successors for Spirit: Liquor and Booze.

  5. Fluffykins Silver badge

    110 yards a day?

    Go on, use the bus lane. I won't tell!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    @Andrew Norris

    You forget it has to go around rocks, so it's not a straight line and it maneuvers relatively slowly, it doesn't have the power to travel at night, and there's a long winter season where it doesn't have the power to travel at all, plus they're stopping along the way for sampling.

  7. Nano nano

    Let's hope ...

    ... they haven't got metric and imperial units mixed up again.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    two years?

    Is that in metric years? What's the conversion to Reg Time Standard?

  9. Skinny
    Alien

    Brilliant Really

    I hope they make it, as an example of an engineering / scientific feat going above and beyond, you can't get a better example than the rovers.

    I say, let em run till they can't run any more!

    I hope whoever designed those beauties have gotten some nice pay raises since they landed.

  10. tempemeaty
    Pirate

    Mission killer.

    I think they just picked the target to run the rover down to end the mission. NASA's Washington boffins are afraid the rank and file might discover the stuff that's been kept from them.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    like R2D2, only better

    Hope they make it. It's great to see the pictures and all the info they are gathering. It's even better that this has worked WAAAAY longer than they ever expected. Well Done!

  12. Robert Hill
    Thumb Up

    About "better, faster, cheaper..."

    Remember that Spirit and Opportunity were the first project to DISMISS with NASA's ill-fated "Better, Faster, Cheaper" mentality of cost-cutting, compressed testing,and lack of oversight?

    And now we get more science and discovery than we had ever hoped for or even dreamed of. NASA CAN build good stuff given the time and budget...time to remember that when budgets come round...

  13. Zed
    Thumb Up

    Above and Beyond

    The rovers have gone far above and beyond their original mission.

    I (for one) hopes the rover makes it - from a pure geek point of view, it's a great example of what can be done when people over-engineer something in the right way. Almost Apollo like from NASA. Good show!

  14. Martin Lyne

    Hmm

    Why was my comment not allowed? I think one of the mods (inexplicably) has it in for me..

    It was entirely on topic! (AFAIR)

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