Travelling to the channels, Extraordinarily unlikely |
Travelling to the channels, Extraordinarily unlikely |
Aug 13 2011, 10:42 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 813 Joined: 8-February 04 From: Arabia Terra Member No.: 12 |
Opportunity is entering a multi-year science campaign at the rim of Endeavour crater, a campaign primarily driven by the interest in clays.
Eventually this investigation will conclude. So where next? Far, far to the south lies a location identified as a go-to target for one of the MSL candidate landing sites- a series of outflow channels. With no possibility of further Mossbauer integrations and the mini-TES severely degraded, wouldn't these features be good targets for an imaging/APXS only geology investigation? Iazu by the middle of the decade, unnamed crater south of Iazu by the end of the decade, channels by middle of the next decade... |
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Aug 18 2011, 03:30 PM
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 62 Joined: 11-July 11 Member No.: 6058 |
Hilarious list, MoreInput! Like Stu (and probably a lot of people on this forum), I have often sighed at the thought that perhaps thirty seconds' worth of elbow grease and a quick clean of the solar panels by an astronaut and Spirit would have been on her way back in 2010...
This thread raises a related question (and I hope this is not considered too off-topic, administrators) - how will NASA and indeed ESA prioritise a rover/lander mission to the sites of the supposed briny water outflows in the southern hemisphere? Would this take precedence over other sites of scientific interest when the time comes to design missions for launch in the late 2010s/early 2020s? |
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