It's been confirmed, it's a meteroite.
Initial looks at the rock stirred considerable speculation that the object could
be a meteorite - speculation now confirmed. Opportunity's Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) was suggestive that the find was metal in nature.Last week, Squyres took a wait-and-see mode, eagerly awaiting tell-tale data recorded by Opportunity to be transmitted to Earth last weekend. The rover's Mssbauer Spectrometer was moved into position over the suspect meteorite, to determine the composition and abundance of iron-bearing minerals.
Earlier last week, Laurie Leshin, Director of the Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona was tempted by the images to conclude that the object was, indeed, a meteorite.
Took long enough. :)
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter a.k.a. 'Mr. O'
Here's the next stage of Mars observation.
Less than two years from now, MRO is tasked to start a series of global mapping, regional survey and targeted observations from a near-polar, low-altitude Mars orbit. It will fly closer to the martian surface than any other orbiter has ever gone. MRO is equipped with six primary instruments: the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, Context Camera, Mars Color Imager, Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, Mars Climate Sounder and Shallow Radar. The orbiter will also carry a telecommunications relay package and two engineering demonstrations.
The road to Mars for MRO has not been without difficulty. "The development of the instrumentsthey are all state-of-the-art," Graf said. "They are brand new instruments. So that has been one of the biggest challenges."
Graf said that MRO is an unprecedented workhorse of a spacecraft. Given its memory storage and computer smarts, as well as the probe's telecommunications package and power capability, "it's the cornerstone of the future Mars program," he said. MRO carries a large set of solar arrays and a huge high gain antenna. "It's wonderful isn't it," Graf said, pointing to the dish antenna that measures some 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter -- hardware that will enable the craft to pump out enormous streams of information back to Earth from Mars orbit.
"We're going to be awash in data. There's no doubt about it," Graf added. "Let's get intensestart an investigation of the planet in a mode that's entirely different than anything we've done before."
It's all good news.
- Art Neuro
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