OPPORTUNITY, NASA’s second rover, has landed safely – right in the middle of a crater. That’s great news for the geologists on the team as it will allow them to study something they have never had access to before: Martian bedrock.
The landing, on early Sunday morning GMT, was unexpectedly gentle. Within an hour, Opportunity had relayed the first pictures of its surroundings in Meridiana Planum back to NASA’s mission control in Pasadena, California. As expected, they show a very different landscape to anything previously seen by missions that have landed on Mars. The region, in a large zone rich in…
