The First Martian Marathon
 
May 15, 2015:  On Earth, the fastest runners can finish a marathon in hours. 
On Mars it takes about 11 years.
 
On Tuesday, March 24th 2015, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity completed its first
Red Planet marathon-- 26.219 miles - with a finish time of roughly 11 years
and two months.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gN_cmK9TUc&feature=youtu.be
 
A new ScienceCast video follows Opportunity on its marathon trek across Mars. 
Play it
 
"This mission isn't about setting distance records; it's about making
scientific discoveries," says Steve Squyres, Opportunity principal
investigator at Cornell University. "Still, running a marathon on Mars feels
pretty cool."
 
Runner-author Hal Higdon once said, "The marathon never ceases to be a race of
joy, a race of wonder." That goes double for a marathon on another world where
every mile promises a new discovery.
 
Opportunity's mission is to search for signs of ancient water. Today the Red
Planet has a breathtakingly thin atmosphere, with conditions deadly to almost
every known form of life on Earth. Billions of years ago, however, things
might have been different. Many researchers believe that Mars was once warmer,
wetter, and friendlier to potential Martian life. Opportunity's job is to
search for clues to that ancient time.
 
Like many long-distance runners, Opportunity likes to "take it slow." On a
typical drive day, the rover travels only 50 to 100 meters.  This gives the
rover time to safely traverse the rocky terrain, pause and look for the
unknown. True to form, the long-lived rover surpassed the marathon mark during
a drive of only 46.9 meters or 154 feet.
 
http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/home/
 
Visit NASA's Mars Exploration Rover home page"When Opportunity landed on Mars
11 years ago, no one imagined this vehicle surviving a Martian winter, let
alone completing a marathon," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John
Callas of JPL. To celebrate, the Mars rover team at JPL held a marathon-length
relay race.
 
For Opportunity, just getting to the starting line was epic: "This particular
marathoner had to fly about 283 million miles across space before being
unceremoniously drop-bounced on the Martian surface in 2004," recalls Ray
Arvidson, a member of the Opportunity science team from Washington University.
 
Opportunity first uncovered signs of water in deposits near the landing site
in Eagle Crater.  There were rocks that seemed to have formed in an ancient
shallow lake, albeit too acidic for life.  Next, mission planners set their
sights on Endeavour Crater - an enormous pit 14 miles wide and hundreds of
meters deep. Endeavour's depth would offer a look farther back into the
history of Mars, to a time when the water was possibly less acidic.
 
The marathon route crossing Mars' Meridiani plain to Endeavour was a daring
trek -with no aid stations anywhere. Raging dust storms reduced the rover's
solar power so much that Opportunity almost entered the "sleep of death";
soft, sandy, wind-blown ripples trapped the rover's wheels, and there was an
injury: a failure in Opportunity's right front steering actuator, which made
running forward tricky. Ever resourceful, the rover ran part of its race
backwards.
 
When the marathoner reached Endeavour Crater in August 2011, things got
interesting.
 
"Endeavour is surrounded by fractured sedimentary rock, and the cracks are
filled with gypsum," says Arvidson. "Gypsum forms when groundwater comes up
and fills cracks in the ground, so this was good evidence for liquid water."
 
Moreover, the gypsum veins were likely formed in conditions less acidic and
possibly more hospitable to life: Jackpot!
 
What's next? Opportunity is still going strong as it heads for a gap in the
rim of Endeavour Crater where the rover will explore clay deposits for more
signs of ancient water. The gap is called-you guessed it-"Marathon Valley."
 
Martian ultra-marathon, anyone?
 
Credits:
Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Production editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit:
Science@NASA
 
 
Regards,
 
Roger

--- D'Bridge 3.99
 * Origin: NCS BBS - Houma, LoUiSiAna (1:3828/7)