Mars rover arrives at new crater

Aug 10, 2011, 19:21 GMT

Washington - The Mars rover Opportunity has reached a new crater after a nearly three-year journey and will begin studying never-before-examined rocks, NASA said Wednesday.

Opportunity arrived at the rim of the Endeavour crater Tuesday and relayed its position back to scientists on Earth.

The crater is much wider than the earlier crater, Victoria, explored by the golf-cart sized rover. The rocks in the new location there are much older than anything yet seen by Opportunity, which has been trawling the Red Planet's surface for seven years.

The Endeavour site was chosen after the Mars Reconnaissance Oribiter saw clay minerals at the site from its orbit, and scientists think the find may indicate evidence of a warmer, wetter history on the planet.

'We're soon going to get the opportunity to sample a rock type the rovers haven't seen yet,' scientist Matthew Golombek said. 'Clay minerals form in wet conditions, so we may learn about a potentially habitable environment that appears to have been very different from those responsible for the rocks comprising the plains.'

Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, were launched in 2003 and originally only scheduled to complete three-month missions. Both far outlived their engineered life spans, returning troves of information about the planet. Spirit finally stopped communicating with Earth in March 2010.