NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found bright veins of a mineral, apparently gypsum, deposited by water. Analysis of the vein will help improve understanding of the history of wet environments on Mars. “This tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through...

While NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity was traveling from Victoria crater to Endeavour crater, between September 2008 and August 2011, the rover team took an end-of-drive image on each Martian day that included a drive. A new video compiles these 309 images, providing an...

More than seven years after completing their three-month prime missions on opposite sides of Mars, NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been selected for lifetime achievement award honors as part of the Breakthrough Awards presented by Popular Mechanics magazine. The magazine today...

A view of a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center towers was taken on Mars yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The memorial, made from aluminum recovered from the site of the twin towers in weeks following the attacks, serves as a cable...

In September 2001, Honeybee Robotics employees in lower Manhattan were building a pair of tools for grinding weathered rinds off rocks on Mars, so that scientific instruments on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity could inspect the rocks’ interiors. That...

Opportunity is continuing the in-situ (contact) investigation of rocks around the rim of Endeavour crater. On Sol 2697 (Aug. 25, 2011), the rover bumped a mere 0.15 meters (about 6 inches) to reposition at the large ejecta block, named “Tinsdale 2.” This allowed Opportunity to...

The initial work of NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity at its new location on Mars shows surface compositional differences from anything the robot has studied in its first 7.5 years of exploration. Opportunity arrived three weeks ago at the rim of a 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) crater...

Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has captured new images of intriguing Martian terrain from a small crater near the rim of the large Endeavour crater. The rover arrived at the 13-mile-diameter (21-kilometer-diameter) Endeavour on Aug. 9, after a journey of almost three years.  Opportunity...

After a journey of almost three years, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reached the Red Planet’s Endeavour crater to study rocks never seen before.  On Aug. 9, the golf cart-sized rover relayed its arrival at a location named Spirit Point on the crater’s rim....

The NASA Mars rover Opportunity has gained a view of Endeavour crater from barely more than a football-field’s distance away from the rim. The rim of Endeavour has been the mission’s long-term goal since mid-2008. Endeavour offers the setting for plenty of productive work by...

Opportunity is only about 1.1 kilometers (0.68 miles) from “Spirit Point,” the first landfall on the rim of Endeavour crater. The rover continues to make very good progress, driving five times in the last week and totaling over 510 meters of drive distance. The right-front wheel...

Opportunity is now within 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) of the first landfall on the rim of Endeavour crater, at a place called “Spirit Point.” With multi-sol planning for the 4th of July holiday weekend, the rover drove only once in the past week with a drive to the southeast on Sol...

Opportunity continues the trek towards Endeavour crater, now less than 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) away. The rover drove on four of the last six sols. On Sol 2595 (May 13, 2011), Opportunity headed southeast with a drive of over 91 meters (300 feet). On the next sol, the rover drove further...

When NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover uses an onboard navigation capability during backward drives, it leaves a distinctive pattern in the wheel tracks visible on the Martian ground. The pattern appears in an image posted at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=PIA14129. The...

A flat, light-toned rock on Mars visited by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover in 2005 informally bears the name of the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, who rode into orbit in the Soviet Union’s Vostok-1 spacecraft on April 12, 1961. The team using Opportunity to explore the...

Opportunity completed the in-situ (contact) investigation on the surface target Ruiz Garcia at Santa Maria crater.On Sol 2520 (Feb. 25, 2011), the rover used the robotic arm (Instrument Deployment Device, or IDD) to collect a microscopic imager (MI) image mosaic of Ruiz Garcia. Then, it placed...

Opportunity is completing the last in-situ (contact) study at Santa Maria crater.On Sol 2520 (Feb. 25, 2011), the rover bumped 5.35 meters (18 feet) forward to approach the target “Ruiz Garcia,” an exposed rock. Then, on the next sol, Opportunity attempted to collect a series of...

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has nearly completed its three-month examination of a crater informally named “Santa Maria,” but before the rover resumes its overland trek, an orbiting camera has provided a color image of Opportunity beside Santa Maria.The High...

The team operating NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity will temporarily suspend commanding for 16 days after the rover’s seventh anniversary next week, but the rover will stay busy. For the fourth time since Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time (Jan. 24, Pacific...

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a Dec. 31, 2010, view of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on the southwestern rim of a football-field-size crater called “Santa Maria.” Opportunity arrived at...

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity reached a crater about the size of a football field-some 90 meters (295 feet) in diameter. The rover team plans to use cameras and spectrometers during the next several weeks to examine rocks exposed at the crater, informally named “Santa...