I don’t care to nurse my politics all day long.  Nope, once or twice in my day some opportunity comes along that lifts the spirit a little.  Here’s a prime example, courtesy of NASA and Nature.com.  Not that NASA isn’t political, you understand.  Sending minority equal-people into space is nothing if not political.

But none of that Shuttle stuff comes into play with the pure research goals of the Mars Rover programme ...

What’s the Opportunity rover up to now?

Opportunity has just finished an epic voyage to the edge of Victoria crater and is taking a good look over the side.

It has taken 21 months to make the 9-kilometre journey – breakneck speed, according to project scientist Bruce Banerdt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

What’s the Opportunity rover up to now?

Opportunity has just finished an epic voyage to the edge of Victoria crater and is taking a good look over the side.

It has taken 21 months to make the 9-kilometre journey – breakneck speed, according to project scientist Bruce Banerdt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“It was a gamble to go to Victoria,” he says. It was so far away that Opportunity was quite likely to run out of steam before it got there. “We decided to drive as fast as we could.”

Why is this crater worth such a dash?

It’s big. It’s deep (70 metres). It’s wide (800 metres). Other craters investigated by Opportunity have been small fry in comparison. The depth of the cliffs means that more layers of rock are exposed and so a longer geological history can be probed than before. The bottom is at least a billion years old, say researchers.

The rover has ventured out on to a rocky point on the crater’s rim and now has a panoramic view of the nearest cliff face.

What is Opportunity looking for, specifically?

The rover has a number of instruments on board: a thermal emission spectrometer will probe the rock layers to discover their composition, an alpha-particle spectrometer will give information about the elements, and a Mössbauer spectrometer will work out the abundance and composition of any iron-bearing minerals. Opportunity doesn’t have a way to age the rock, although the deeper it gets the older it will be.

The point is to work out whether there are signs of ancient water, and to see whether past habitats on the red planet could have been conducive to life.

Shouldn’t Opportunity have ‘died’ ages ago?

Opportunity and its sister rover Spirit were designed to work for 90 days. It was reasonable to think they might last for perhaps twice that, but no one expected these super-rovers to last for more than ten times their predicted lifespan (as of 29 September, Opportunity had been on the go for 954 days).

Spirit is currently at the end of a four month rest: it has stayed still, watching the weather, while waiting for the winter season to pass and its solar panels to heat up.

Their longevity has actually triggered some problems. In a scenario reminiscent of the millennium bug scare, the software on Opportunity and Spirit recently had to be upgraded in a hurry as the tick-over from 999 days to 1,000 was expected to cause some glitches. Thankfully, that has now been fixed.

Will Opportunity drive into the depths of the crater?

You bet. The team has pinpointed a few slopes that look shallow enough for the rover to navigate. Hopefully it won’t take a tumble.

How about some more extreme manoeuvres… a last hurrah before the circuits finally die?

It’s a nice idea: particularly as every dollar now spent on these rovers is a dollar not put towards future missions. But Banerdt denies that there are any rovercidal tendencies in the team.

“There is no move, not even a suggestion, to take more risks with the rovers,” he says. “Although we might joke about it over lunch,” he adds.

Where will Opportunity go next?

If the rover survives this adventure, another one is around the corner. “There’s an even bigger crater to the south, 7 kilometres away,” Banerdt says.

Will it ever end?

Banerdt admits to having no idea when Opportunity will rove its last mile or snap its last picture. “You have to look at every day as if it were the last day,” he says.