Opportunity Busy Through Depth of Winter

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Mars Rover Opportunity Busy Through Depth of Winter

NASA's senior Mars rover, Opportunity, worked through the lowest-solar-energy days of the mission's seventh Martian winter, while using a diamond-toothed rock grinder and other tools in recent weeks to investigate clues about the Red Planet's environmental history.

The modern Mars environment lent a hand, providing wind that removed some dust from Opportunity's solar panels in the weeks before and after the Mars southern hemisphere's winter solstice on Jan. 2.

"Opportunity has stayed very active this winter, in part because the solar arrays have been much cleaner than in the past few winters," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

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