News Archive

Thursday, January 13, 2005 Opportunity Finds a Weird Object The object. Credit: NASA/JPL Roaming away from the debris field, Opportunity found a hunk of something on Meridiani Planum. "We're curious about it too. We have Mini-TES data on it now, and they suggest that it may actually be made of metal," said Dr. Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rovers. "So we are beginning to suspect that it may be a meteorite. I stress that this is very preliminary!" The next thing on NASA's list is to test the object with Opportunity’s Instrument Deployment Device (in laymen’s terms, the robot arm which has scientific instruments, such as the Mössbauer Spectrometer, the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, and a Rock Abrasion Tool). Huygens will land tomorrow. I will post something as soon as information comes in. Godspeed to the Huygens team. (More info: Space.com) @ 20:53 EST