Mars Rover Opportunity Mission Status
January 16, 2004
With barely a week before reaching Mars, NASA's Opportunity
spacecraft adjusted its trajectory, or flight path, today
for the first time in four months.
The spacecraft carries a twin to the Spirit rover, which is
now exploring Mars' Gusev Crater. It will land halfway
around Mars, in a region called Meridiani Planum, on Jan.
25 (Universal Time and EST; Jan. 24 at 9:05 p.m., PST).
For today's trajectory correction maneuver, engineers at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.,
commanded Opportunity at 6 p.m. PST to fire thrusters in a
sequence carefully calculated by the mission's navigators.
The spacecraft is spinning at two rotations per minute. The
maneuver began with a 20-second burn in the direction of
the axis of rotation, then included two 5-second pulses
perpendicular to that axis.
"Looks like we got a nice burn out of Opportunity," said
JPL's Jim Erickson, mission manager. "We're on target for
our date on the plains of Meridiani next Saturday with a
healthy spacecraft."
Before the thruster firings, Opportunity was headed for a
landing about 384 kilometers (239 miles) west and south of the intended
landing site, said JPL's Christopher Potts, deputy
navigation team chief for the Mars Exploration Rover
Project. The maneuver was designed to put it on course for
the target.
Opportunity's schedule still includes two more possible
trajectory correction maneuvers, on Jan. 22 and Jan. 24,
but the maneuvers will only be commanded if needed.
As of 5 a.m. Sunday, PST, Opportunity will have traveled
444 million kilometers (276 million miles) since its July 7
launch, and will have 12.5 million kilometers (7.8 million
miles) left to go.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology,
manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's
Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Additional
information about the project is available from JPL at
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University,
Ithaca, N.Y., at http://athena.cornell.edu .
