Opportunity Moves On

NASA’s Opportunity Rover on Mars is leaving Victoria Crater, a place it has been exploring for nearly one Earth year. It looked back toward Cape Verde, a rock promontory that has intriguing layers of rock that the rover could study. Those layers are treasure troves of information about the environment that existed on Mars when they were laid down, and in the geologic eras after that when the rocks were affected by weathering and other processes.

Now that Opportunity is back on flat ground, it taking off (slowly) across the Meridiani plains to study smaller rocks that were dug up and tossed out during long-ago impacts that created nearby craters. It’s the sort of standard planetary geology that people do on Earth, and we’re lucky to have the Mars rover to do it for us on the Red Planet.  Read more and follow the mission along with the scientists, at NASA’s Mars web site.