NASA Mars Rover Opportunity Update: April 25-30, 2014

OPPORTUNITY UPDATE:  Reset and Recovery – sols 3645-3649, April 25, 2014-April 30, 2014:

Opportunity is exploring south of “Solander Point” on the west rim of Endeavour Crater. The rover is headed to a region of aluminum-hydroxyl clay minerals detected from orbit.

On Sol 3645 (April 25, 2014), Opportunity experienced a reset caused by write errors in flash (non-volatile) memory. As a result, the rover halted the sol’s planned activities and waited for instructions from the ground. On Sol 3648 (April 29, 2014), the rover team sent commands to Opportunity to clear the fault conditions, to initialize both the high-gain antenna and the Pancam Mast Assembly, and to resume normal sequence control. Flash-induced resets have been seen three times before on Opportunity. Engineers are investigating the possible cause.

On Sol 3649 (April 30, 2014), the rover drove just over 230 feet (70 meters) southward. With backward driving, the rover’s right-front wheel currents have returned to lower levels, compared to elevated currents experienced recently.

As of Sol 3649, solar-array energy production was 624 watt-hours, with an uncalibrated atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.293 and a solar-array dust factor of 0.832. Perfectly clean solar arrays would have a dust factor of 1.0, so the larger the dust factor, the cleaner the arrays.

Total odometry is 24.37 miles (39.22 kilometers).