NASA's Opportunity Rover To Explore Mars Gully

In rather exciting news from NASA, for the first time ever, the Opportunity Mars Rover will drive down a gully that had been carved long time ago by a fluid, believed to be water, according to the latest plans for the Mars mission that was launched in 2004. No Mars rover has done this earlier.

For the last five years, Opportunity Mars Rover has been exploring Endeavour Crater, a 22-kilometer-wide basin that was formed due to a meteor impact billions of years ago. It will be for first time that the longest-active Mars rover will traverse the interior of the crater it worked beside for five years.

NASA is going to send @MarsRovers Opportunity down a water-curved gully on Mars. A first for a rover. Very cool. https://t.co/ICKNF8SYQI pic.twitter.com/0FcAo3caKW

— Jonny O'Callaghan (@Astro_Jonny) October 10, 2016

Opportunity Mars Rover was launched on 7 July, 2003 and it landed on Mars on 24 January, 2004. It was on a planned mission that was expected to last for 90 Martian days which are equivalent to 92.4 Earth days. The current activities are a part of the newest extended mission that began on October 1, 2016. Opportunity will travel through a gully that's as long as two football fields in the "Bitterroot Valley" area of the western rim of Endeavour.

According to NASA, the Mars rover reached the edge of this enormous crater in 2011. It investigated a series on smaller craters over a period of more than seven years. The rover had found evidences of ancient acidic water inside those craters.

"We are confident this is a fluid-carved gully, and that water was involved," said Opportunity Principal Investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. "Fluid-carved gullies on Mars have been seen from orbit since the 1970s, but none had been examined up close on the surface before."

Opportunity Mars Rover is into its 12^th year on Mars. Though the rover is still working and sending quality information, it has started to get a little worse for wear. The loss includes one of its memory caching systems in 2015, according to IFL Science.

NASA is planning to launch Opportunity's next generation rover, Curiosity along with three NASA Mars orbiters and surface missions in 2018 and 2020. They are being considered as steps in NASA's Journey to Mars, on track for sending humans there in the 2030s.