In the spring of this year, the planet celebrated its 45th anniversary since the visit of the Moon by Apollo 16. At this time, the Opportunity rover passed by the crater, which strongly reminded the mission.
Team apparatus unofficially nicknamed him “Crater of Orion”. This is a reference to the Apollo 16 Orion lunar device. It was used in April 1972 by John Young and Charles Duke to land on the lunar surface while Ken Mattingly watched them from a ship in orbit around a satellite. Orion is also the name of a NASA spacecraft whose purpose is to transport people into deep space. On April 26, 2017, the panoramic camera Opportunity managed to take a picture of this crater. It is 27 meters wide, and its age is 10 million years.
It turns out that it is almost completely consistent with the lunar crater, which the above-mentioned astronauts investigated during the first walk on the rover.
The picture was sent to Duke, to which he replied: “This is just fantastic! What a resemblance! I dream of standing on the edge of the crater Orion, as I did it 45 years ago on the moon. ”
