NASA Mars Rover Opportunity Update: June 16-20, 2013

OPPORTUNITY UPDATE: Opportunity is Healthy and Driving to ‘Solander Point’ – sols 3340-3344, Jun. 16, 2013-Jun. 20, 2013:

Opportunity is in good health. As of June 21, 2013, Opportunity has been on Mars for five Martian years.

The project successfully recovered the rover from the flash-memory write error induced reset on Sol 3336 (June 12, 2013), which left the rover without a running master sequence.

The initial recovery attempt on Sol 3337 (June 13, 2013), was not successful because the rover did not wake earlier enough to receive the recovery commands, although it was understood that this was a possibility due to variability in the morning wake-up time. Opportunity was successfully recovered over Sols 3338 and 3339 (June 14 and 15, 2013).

The second sol also included a 246-foot (75-meter) drive. That drive contained the first part of a two-sol test of multi-sol autonomous driving. The rover drove again on Sol 3342 (June 18, 2013), with a 200-foot (61-meter) drive which contained the second part of the multi-sol autonomous driving. On Sol 3344 (June 20, 2013), the science team decided to head east toward the feature called ‘Nobbys Head’ for a closer look with the rover driving just under 108 feet (33 meters). The plan ahead is to turn south and make a direct beeline to ‘Solander Point’ still over a kilometer away.

As of Sol 3344 (June 20, 2013), the solar array energy production was 497 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.801 and a solar array dust factor of 0.626.

Total odometry is 22.89 miles (36.84 kilometers).