New control teams were sent to a veteran all-terrain vehicle on June 27, after Mars changed its position in the Solar System — when the Sun blocked the connection between Earth and Mars — and, having recently completed the Olympic marathon distance, NASA made an epic video documenting the six-year-old Mars adventure of a six-wheeled robot.
The video is made up of images taken with the help of the all-terrain vehicles (Hazcams) protected from danger, from the moment of its landing on Mars in January 2004 to April 2015. For 8 minutes you can see the rover, exploring the plains and craters for 26, 2 miles (42, 2 km) from the Plateau of Meridian. On the left is the Hazcam camera view, and on the right is the Opportunity travel map.
As added in addition, the audio recording was obtained from data transmitted by the Opportunity accelerometer - the louder the sound, the rougher the terrain. Interestingly, during the ride of the rover on sandy terrain, there was a muffled sound, almost the same as that issued when driving on fresh snow.
The fact that Opportunity still roams Mars and has been conducting scientific research there for more than a decade after landing doesn’t call it mind-blowing, considering that its main intended mission was to last only 3 months. This is a feat of the achievements of space technology, which every day continue to delight us more and more. However, in recent months, the NASA mission team has encountered a recurring problem with the focusing of Opportunity memory.
In 2014, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (in Pasadena, California) reported that the rover was experiencing “amnesia” problems; These missions were not recorded in the non-volatile memory of the rover. This had the effect of triggering random drops and telemetry loss when the rover turns off at night.
It was hoped that the software would fix the data loaded earlier this year and solve the problem (the fix would help avoid using the damaged data bank in the rover’s flash memory), but the amnesia of events continued, causing the mission controllers to use only non-volatile Opportunity memory, loading data at the end of each work day, critically bypassing flash memory.
"Opportunity can continue to achieve scientific goals in this mode," said John Callas, project manager for Opportunity JPL. "The data that we collect on the same day is transmitted daily."
“Flash memory is a convenience, but not a necessity for a rover,” Kallas added in a press release on Monday. Callas. “It's like storing in the fridge. Without it, you couldn’t store any uneaten foods. Any food you cook, on that day, you will have to either eat or throw away. Without using flash memory, the Opportunity Rover had to send priority data to Earth, which it collected on the same day, and lose less priority data that could not meet the transmission. " The Opportunity all-terrain vehicle is currently on the edge of the “Marathon Valley” - a 14-mile wide Endeavor crater, and the mission leaders plan to explore this interesting scientifically interesting valley over the next few months, taking advantage of the slope lighting of the sun.
According to orbital intelligence, it is known that the Marathon Valley contains clay minerals that the all-terrain vehicle can study at close range. We hope to reveal more detailed details on how these clays are formed and at what humidity the conditions that have developed since antiquity. Coupled with data collected by NASA's Curiosity (Curiosity) rover in the Tempest Crater (and information gathered by the “Opportunity's sister rover Spirit” rover, which was announced lost in 2010), these exciting surface exploration missions continue to deliver important information about a potentially habitable red planet.
