Travelling to the channels, Extraordinarily unlikely Options

[SFJCody]

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...

[Greg Hullender]

Planning out the next 20 years seems a BIT ambitious. :-) Besides, I think they could spend the next 5 just exploring Endeavour.

--Greg

[PaulM]

Scott Maxwell tweeted that the first big color pan of Endeavour crater could be made during a 2 month Mossbauer integration. The last Mossbauer integration at Santa Maria crater took 2 weeks and so I think that Scott was exagerating. None the less it shows that the time taken in exploring Cape York could easily exceed 6 months.

I think that it could take 3 more years before Oppy is finished with Cape Tribulation, especially if hill climbing is planned. I therefore think that the probability of Oppy reaching the channels described in this thread is zero.

[Eluchil]

On the one hand getting to the channels described in the opening post would be a 20+ year drive on a vehicle that was warrantied for just 90 sols, but on the other the first leg of the proposed path, anti-clockwise around Endevour's rim and then on to Iazu seems like a reasonable long-term plan. After all, having been wrong so many times before, I hate to bet against Oppy now. Of course that doesn't mean that anything less than a complete survey of Capes York and Tribulation is desirable. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, as the saying goes. We have been incredibly blessed by the longevity of this mission. I am sure that I am not the only one who remembers when Victoria crater seemed impossibly far away and comforted myself by thinking that the etched terrain would make a fitting final resting place for a rover that had more than doubled her mission goals. 30 km later it seems silly but it was no more than sober assessment at the time.