June 6, 2017: Opportunity shoots the moon on arrival at Perseverance Valley: In another dynamic demonstration of what can be achieved when a team works together, Opportunity cruised to the top of Perseverance Valley in May, shot the moon, and drove the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission into its 160th month of surface operations.
Perseverance Valley is a place unlike any the MER mission has visited and the rover’s arrival there represents a magnificent achievement. “We’ve proved through lots of perseverance that we could make it and we have arrived,” announced MER Principal Investigator Steve Squyres, the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University. “It’s so new and so different. And it’s really, really cool.”
Cutting west to east and forming a broad notch in Endeavour Crater’s western rim at Cape Byron, “the valley stretches downhill for the length of about two football fields, around 720 feet or 220 meters, top to bottom, on a slope of about 15 to 17 degrees,” said Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson, Washington University St. Louis… [More at link]