You might be forgiven for thinking that there’s only one “Mars rover” on the Red Planet at the moment. The Mars Science Laboratory rover “Curiosity”has been grabbing the headlines over the past few months, and making some fantastic discoveries, even though it isn’t actually roving much – and I honestly think of it as a mobile laboratory now rather than an actual rover. But MSL isn’t alone on Mars. On the other side of the planet, a smaller, less advanced but much more plucky robot, “Opportunity”, has just driven over and crunched into the cold martian dust a record that has stood for more than three decades. And with a week or so she should smash another record, and go down in the history books as the Most Travelled Rover In Spaceflight History. But more of that later.

Back in August 2011, after a multi-year drive south from Victoria Crater, Opportunity (“Oppy” to her friends!) arrived at Cape York, a small, rocky “island” on the eroded, ancient rim of a much larger crater called Endeavour. Here’s a high resolution view of Cape York, made from images taken by the HiRISE camera onboard the MRO orbiter. South is at the top of the image, and Oppy arrived at this “end” of the Cape, at an area christened “Spirit Point”. She then rolled up onto the Cape and began heading north, exploring as she went…

If you have a pair of those old-fashioned red and blue 3D glasses handy, you can put them on now and take a 3D tour of the Cape…  click on the image to enlarge it, as usual…

And that’s where Oppy has been for the past couple of years. She’s driven here, there and everywhere on the Cape, as excited as a kid in a zoo,desperate to see and photograph everything. She’s spent all these months studying individual stones, layers of rock, veins of minerals altered by ancient martian water, and more… Here’s where she is today  – driving down the eastern flank of the Cape, and quickly, too…

Cape York has been a geological treasure trove for Oppy and her team – but it’s time to move on. South of Cape York is an even more intriguing and even more science rich feature of the martian landscape – Cape Tribulation, a range of rolling hills which forms another part of the crater’s ancient rim. Oppy is now heading back down Cape York because she’s going to roll off the Cape, steam south, and drive to and then up onto Cape Tribulation at “Solander Point”…

On her way to Solander Point she might stop briefly at another feature…

…but we’ll have to wait and see. Solander Point is the main prize, and possibly always has been, because MRO’s instruments have detected higher concentrations of clay-rich minerals high up on its slopes than they have found anywhere else on Endeavour’s rugged rim, so that’s where Oppy’s future, and destiny, lays. That’s where she’s heading for as you read this…

How long will it take her to get there? A few weeks, I think. The rate she’s going  it seems like the drivers have all been to see the latest FAST AND FURIOUS film and are gunning the little rover and putting the proverbial pedal to the metal. So, for the next few weeks we can probably expect to see Oppy racing towards Solander, with the slopes of Cape Tribulation growing closer, and larger up ahead, every day…

And if she gets there – and there’s no guarantee she will, as Mars loves nothing better than killing space probes – then she’ll start to climb, just as her long lost but never-forgotten sister, Spirit, climbed the Columbia Hills of Gusev Crater. How high will she get? We don’t know. But if she gets even just a few hundred metres up those slopes she’ll be able to look out across Endeavour, and down on Cape York, and send us back quite beautiful views…

But back to that record I mentioned. As Oppy began heading south she passed an incredible martian milestone. Sometime on Thursday, Oppy’s total odometry since landing on Mars reached 22.2 miles, or 35.7 km. S0 what? I hear you ask. Well, that broke a long-standing interplanetary distance record, set not by a robot rover but a rover driven by astronauts…

When Apollo 17 landed on the Moon in December 1972 on the final Apollo mission it carried with it the last of the lunar rovers. These spindly looking vehicles looked like a ramshackle arrangement of boxes and wheels held together by some bits of wire and string, but they were very hardy and hard working, and carried their astronaut passengers across the barren lunar landscape for miles and miles…

During their stay on the Moon, the Apollo 17 LRV carried astronauts Cernan and Schmitt for over 35km, setting a record for the greatest distance travelled by a NASA vehicle on another world. So, when Oppy made her drive on Thursday she broke the Apollo 17 record – an amazing achievement, and one which has been rightly marked and celebrated by NASA with a flurry of press releases and stories online.

But Oppy is now closing in another record – THE record..

This bizarre looking vehicle is the Russian LUNOKHOD 2, a robot rover which landed on the Moon in 1973…

It travelled for 37 kilometres before rolling to a stop. Oppy is now just a couple of drives away from crashing through that record, and when she does there will be much rejoicing, I can tell you! And with Solander Point just 2.2km away from where Oppy is now, it surely won’t be long before the champagne bottles are popping at JPL and throughout NASA.

This is further proof, if any were needed, that Opportunity is a remarkable machine, designed, built, launched, landed and driven by remarkable people. This is a machine that has survived for 9 years – 9 years!!! – on a hostile alien world, battling through dust storms, frigid, computer-murdering temperatures, and worse. I have no doubt that in years to come Opportunity’s trek will be celebrated by space historians here on Earth, and by people living on Mars. I’m also sure that in a couple of centuries she will be on display in a museum on Mars, lovingly cleaned of dust and dirt and restored to her shiny fresh-from-the-JPL-clean-room glory, seen by thousands of visitors each long martian year. I’d like to think that some of my astropoetry written about her, and Spirit, will be on display nearby too!

And if that sounds a bit cheesy, a bit over sentimental, well, that’s the way I feel about the two MERs. I genuinely do miss Spirit, and I love following Oppy’s ongoing journey. It seems very real to me, as if I’m there walking alongside her, and I know many people feel the same. I feel just as excited about Oppy’s martian marathon as I did when she landed all those years ago, far more excited and passionate than I do about Curiosity. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because Curioisty isn’t actually, you know, *roving* as I thought she would. I know she’s doing fascinating and historic science, and making discoveries that are re-writing the text books, etc etc, but there’s a nagging voice at the back of my mind that is saying that she should be doing more, seeing more, driving more, because as we all know Mars **hates** visitors from Earth, and tries its best to break and destroy them. Curiosity needs to get a move on, and see new places, study new rocks, DO more. She needs to rove. There’s a ****** great MOUNTAIN behind her, with layers and layers of geological goodness, and between it and Curiosity there are countless fascinating features, but she’s shuffling in place and ignoring them. There are valid scientific reasons I’m sure, but as an “armchair enthusiast” and as someone fascinated by Mars, this lack of activity has meant I haven’t engaged with or embraced MSL as I’d expected and hoped to. Hate to say it, but MSL is boring me. I’m sick of seeing the same horizon, the same rocks, the same dunes.”Been here too long, seen these stones for too long…” I think when I go to the images page and see the same views as yesterday, and the day before, and the day before… Selfish of me I know, and certainly unfair on the hard working and dedicated MSL team, but Curiosity was designed as a *rover*, and so far, let’s be honest, it hasn’t been, it’s been a mobile, second generation Viking lander. It’s leaving me rather cold, I’m afraid. I wish they’d just MOVE the ****** thing, you know? There’s so much more to see at the landing site, so many more fascinating locations to drive to and study.

And behind them, looming over the landing site, is that huge ******* mountain!!!! Get UP there Curiosity!! Just GO!! Ignore your orders from Earth to stay where you are, to take your time, to be cautious and slow, and just start rolling!

I know… they will, eventually. They’ll turn her around and head up into the hills, and we’ll all see those “amazing landscapes” we were told about before launch and landing, then I’ll eat my words. I look forward to that!

But Oppy… Oppy is like a terrier isn’t she? Dashing from place to place, tail wagging, panting “Look at this! Look at this!” excitedly with her first sight of each new view. I can’t wait for her to roll down off Cape York and begin to hare across Botany Bay, preparing for her assault on Cape Tribulation at Solander Point! It’s going to be like a whole new mission! (Again..!)

I hope you’ll follow that new mission with me as it unfolds here.

Anyway, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible!

Stu

But before she sets off Oppy is completing her painstaking study of a fin-like rocky feature on the eastern flank of Cape York. She’s been here for months, photographing and studying the rocks here in incredible detail, making sure every drop of science is squeezed out of them before they’re left behind. It will be a long, long time before anything or anyone else sees these rocks again, so the MER team are obviously determined to make sure they’re known inside and out before they’re abandoned, possibly for a century.

And so, Oppy has been using her rock abrasion tool, or RAT, to drill into the rock at her feet to examine it very closely. She does this because the surfaces of martian rocks have been changed over time, eroded and modified, but the inside of the rocks have been protected and have remained unchanged. Studying the rocks’ interiors tells scientists a lot about what conditions were like on Mars long, long ago.

Which is why Oppy has done this, leaving yet another mark on Mars for future generations to find…

* Only joking! I love Curiosity really, but like many people I wish she’d get on with driving! I know the site she’s at now is hugely interesting and important scientifically, and has been a veritable data goldmine for the science team, but it would be so nice to see those wheels turning, and to see the landscape change. Soon, I hope.

Well, she’s still on the eastern flank of Cape York, still studying the rocks and landforms and minerals at Majevic Hill, still taking beautiful pictures. She’s just completed a circuit of a small geologically-fascinating area, ending up where she was months ago …

…looking at this familiar feature…

…but she’s getting itchy wheels, and so, apparently, are her drivers and science team, and it seems pretty certain that before too long Oppy will drive away from where she is now, head south, back down the way she originally came, roll off Cape York back onto the flatter surrounding terrain, and then head south, continuing the curve of the great Endeavour crater’s western rim, heading for Solander Point, where a whole new chapter of her thrilling story will begin…

The exact route she will take after leaving Cape York isn’t set in stone yet. One route would have her driving something of a dog leg, stopping at a mini version of Cape York called “Nobby’s head” (no, really, it is…) before continuing to Solander Point. But a more direct route is also being considered, which would miss out “Nobby’s Head” altogether…

Why? What’s the rush? Well, two reasons. Firstly, Oppy is about to be hidden from Earth as Mars goes behind the Sun relative to the Earth, so communicating with her will happen less often than it does usually, so she’ll be on “auto pilot” for a while, carrying out some science experiments and tasks but not really driving very much. Also, winter is approaching, and that means Oppy has to find somewhere where she can park up somewhere that tilts towardsthe Sun as it traces out its low arc across the martian sky, allowing her to  soak up as many of the Sun’s rays as she can to keep her going and functioning. So the timetable is taking shape, and Oppy is set to depart from here no later than May 9th, and has to be at those Sun-facing Solander slopes by August or things could get nasty.

How do we know this? Because it’s all in the latest fantastic, fact-packed MER Update by AJS Rayl, over on The Planetary Society blog, that’s how…

In the meantime, Oppy continues to take beautiful images, like this…

…and continues to amaze and delight all of her team, and her loyal followers, with her sheer guts and determination. More than 9 years after landing on Mars, Opportunity is still driving, still doing science, still fighting fit, and there can’t be many people who doubt her greatest days and greatest achievements are probably still ahead of her. I think that when she crosses Botany Bay and makes landfall at Solander Point, at the northern end of Cape Tribulation, we are going to see *incredible* views. Personally I’m looking forward to seeing the images she takes of Cape York, as she looks back at where she came from, but the views looking south, along and up to the heights of Cape Tribulation, should be beautiful.

So. Cape York has been brilliant, hasn’t it? One of the highlights of the trip so far! But it’s almost time to go. Pack up everyone, make sure you don’t forget everything. Once we leave we won’t be coming back, and no-one else will be passing by this area for a long, long, long time…

Yes, nine years after landing on Mars, Opportunity is STILL “doing a science” every day. Standing wearily but proudly on the eastern flank of Cape York, on the crumbling edge of mighty Endeavour Crater, Opportunity is sending back new images and new data every day. True, she has no scoop to scrape spoonfuls of soil off the martian surface, no laboratory to drop them into, no sieve to sort them into different sized grains and particles. But she has a heart as big as a whale’s, and was exploring Mars when Curiosity was just a stack of parts and a fancy wire diagram in a NASA computer. She deserves a lot more respect and media attention – a LOT more – than she is getting. And NASA needs to start paying her some more respect too.

Here’s what she’s seeing at the moment…

So, Oppy is still exploring geological features on the eastern flank of Cape York, on the decayed edge of the huge Endeavour Crater. She’s studying flat, plate-like exposures of rock there, hoping to find clues about the past of Mars. Here are a couple of mosaics I made of pictures taken recently – after clicking on the images to enlarge them, you’ll see the rocks and structures here almost SHOUT “we are old! study us!”…

Nine years ago, one of the most incredible adventures in the history of human exploration began. Not on Earth, but on Mars.

Nine years ago the Mars Exploration Rover “Opportunity” landed on Mars, and so began one of the most exciting, most significant missions in the history of space travel.

If you’d been stood on the Meridiani Plain on the Red Planet nine years ago today you would have seen a remarkable sight – a bizarre, plump, puffy ball falling from the salmon pink sky on the end of a parachute. Standing there you would probably have raised your hands to your mouth in shock, and called out in alarm as you watched the parachute detach, and the puff ball drop to the ground. Expecting it to shatter and smash as it slammed into the rock- and boulder-strewn desert you would have feared the worst – but instead of blowing itself into a million tinkling, shining pieces it bounced back up into the air… then came down again… and bounced up again… and came down again, each impact kicking up a cloud of dust the colour of cinnamon, or paprika, that hung in the thin air like breath on a frosty day…

And then, standing there, beneath that huge sky, with a shrunken, lemon-hued Sun bathing your face and the alien landscape around you in a cold, hard light, you would have seen something even more amazing: with countless miles of vast, open, empty desert all around it, after it stopped boinging and bouncing the strange puffy ball rolled across the ground, like tumbleweed, and fell into a small shallow crater, where it finally, finally came to rest: a cosmic “hole in one” you wouldn’t have believed possible if you hadn’t seen it with your own startled eyes.

That was the arrival of a robot on Mars. A robot from Earth. The third robot from Earth to arrive on Mars within a month. If there are any martians on Barsoom, they must have peered out from under their rocks, or looked out from their cracks and pits on that morning, and thought they were being invaded. As 2003 slid into 2004, and one machine from Earth after another fell out of their sky and landed on their homeworld, any lifeforms on Mars must have worried that they were seeing the start of a War of The Worlds.

The chances of anything coming from Earth were a million to one… but still they had come…

Any martians who witnessed Opportunity’s landing on Mars in January 2004 must have been puzzled, and not a little terrified, because the creature that emerged from its dust-stained coccoon, unfolding itself in painfully slow motion, was a strange contraption indeed: a vaguely insectoid-looking creature with a plethora of wheels, a head covered with cameras and a gleaming carapace of Sun-reflecting solar panels. As it climbed up on its wheels, reaching its full height, it silently surveyed its surroundings, head sweeping from side to side like a Terminator scanning a crowd for John Connor, or an Imperial Scout Droid searching the snowfields of an icy moon for signs of the Rebel Alliance. No doubt any martians around Eagle Crater were vastly relieved to see the new arrival appeared to be more interested in their planet’s rocks and stones than in them, and that it seemed positively hypnotised and entranced by a low shelf of old, crumbling, layered rock that stood just a few feet in front of it, jutting out of the crater’s side…

Nine years ago. Good god, that was nine YEARS ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. The day after my 39th birthday I sat in front of my computer – the same one I’m typing this blog post on now actually (no, really!) – and watched the landing live on NASA TV. Well, I say ‘watched’; I mean ‘peered at a small 2″x2″ Real Player box on my monitor screen, which kept freezing or breaking up because I was on Dialup, not broadband‘! It wasn’t fun, seeing the picture freeze again and again, or just shatter altogether  in a haze of pixels, and I was dreading, absolutely dreading the feed dropping out altogether at the exact moment Opportunity’s safe touchdown was confirmed, but the gods smiled on me and I didn’t miss that moment, and jumped off my chair in delight and relief when the MER team at JPL started whooping and cheering and hollering. That was when I knew she was down, and, like her sister rover, Spirit, which had landed earlier in the month, would soon be exploring Mars. And I was going to be able to walk alongside her, seeing what she saw, experiencing Mars in almost real time, on the company of countless hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people all around the world. It was going to be **fantastic**!

Well, for a short while anyway.

As I drifted off to bed that day, to catch up on some badly needed sleep, like many people I was looking forward to the future with great excitement, wondering what the rovers would find before they died in three months or so. Three months seemed an awfully long time back then, a luxurious length of time. Why, in three months the rovers might drive up to a kilometre away from their landing sites! How brilliant would that be! every day for a quarter of a year the rovers would send back pictures of somewhere new, somewhere different, with different rocks, and a different horizon. It would be like being there! I made special “Opportunity images” and “Spirit Images” on my computer’s C drive and looked forward to Saving images in them, to look at and drool over after Spirit and Opportunity stopped roving. Memory space on my PC was tight, but I wasn’t too worried; how many images could the rovers send back before Easter? A few each day? Even if it was dozens each day that would only mean three thousand pictures or so. My hard drive could take that, right?

Of course, things didn’t go quite according to plan.

After her landing in 2004 Opportunity drove for three months as planned, and then kept driving for three more… then three more… and three more, until suddenly it was 2009 and she had been on Mars for 5 years. And then, laughing at the martian dust and cold, facing and beating everything the Red Planet threw at her, she drove onwards, onwards… She drove to, around, into and back out of craters…

She found and studied meteorites…

She showed us wonder after wonder after wonder, sunset after sunset, sunrise after sunrise…

She took us to Mars.

Of course, Mars itself, never one to welcome visitors, has tried everything in its power to kill her. Cackling like a wicked witch, flipping through its “Big Book Of Ways To Kill Robots Sent From Earth”, Mars threw everything at the rover. Opportunity found her passage across the great Meridiani desert blocked by wheel-sucking dust dunes, which held her fast for weeks on end. Weary, and covered in dust, she hunkered down for, and survived, one potentially rover-killing martian winter after another.  The sky above Opportunity darkened as Morgane le Mars cast spells to summon Sun-smothering martian dust storms, to drain the rover of life, but, like a penguin being battered and buffeted by an Antarctic blizzard, Opportunity faced and faced them down, rolling away again in triumph once the Sun returned to the sky.

And Time ticked on, sol after sol after sol…

A glance at the wall calendar to my side shows me it is now January 2013. Nine years have passed since her epic, ridiculous, against all odds Hole in One arrival, and Opportunity is still driving, and I’m still Saving her pictures in folders, but on an external hard drive, there have been so many. I now must have tens of thousands of pictures taken by Opportunity, Pancam portraits of rugged rocks, Navcam images of crumbling crater walls, fairground mirror warped Hazcam views of the sky, clouds, even the stars as seen from Mars.

Every image is a gift, every picture is a triumph. I love them all. Many people look at something like this…

…and you can see them thinking “Huh… a big ugly rock… big deal…” and, ok, yes, that is a particularly ugly rock, but that’s not the point!  I want to grab them by the throat and shake them and shout at them “Don’t you GET it? Don’t you SEE it? That big ugly rock is ON MARS! That rock is sitting on the ground on another ******* planet! And that picture was taken by a machine that’s as elegant as a pocket watch, and as smart as a fox, and as brave as a lion, that should have stopped working YEARS ago but it’s STILL DRIVING across the surface of an ALIEN WORLD!!!!”

Some people don’t “get it”, and they never will. I used to be frustrated by that, I used to try and show them how incredible Opportunity is, how unbelievable her achievement is, how magnificent the team behind her is… But to be honest, I can’t be bothered any more. If they don’t get it it, if they don’t *want* to get it, then it’s their loss. They’ve had their chance. They can watch the Kardashians pouting and preening, or whatever. Opportunity isn’t for them. Mars isn’t for them. Mars is for the martians, past, present and future.

And as I say in my latest MER astropoem, Opportunity is a martian now. She has been on Mars for longer than she was on Earth, which in my book definitely qualifies her for martian citizenship. And since her arrival she has shown us Mars as it really, truly is – a breathtaking world, with its own character and beauty. I’m proud to say that I’ve kept Oppy company for every leg of her epic Lewis and Clark trek across the red planet. I’ve walked beside her, with my hand on her back, as she’s slogged her way across deserts, into craters and through boulder fields. In return, she’s rewarded me with views like these…

She’s taken me to Mars, my favourite planet since I was knee high to R2D2, and I love her, and the incredible men and women behind her, for it.

Say the words “Mars rover” today and most people think you’re talking about Curiosity, Oppy’s bigger, smarter (some say), stronger, sexier, laser-toting, wheel-crunching, camera-drenched nuclear powered sister. Curiosity landed last August, in Gale Crater, and after conducting a scientific study of the crater floor she’s going to head for the foot of the mountain which stands in the crater’s centre and start to make her way up through its Monument Valley foothills to layered ground higher up. There she may, or may not, find evidence of past martian life. It’s a mind-blowing mission, with possibly paradigm-shifting discoveries in its future. But many people – and most of the media – are unaware that today, as Curiosity stands in the shadow of Mt Sharp, flashing her LEDs and her UV lights, nine years after landing on Mars, another rover is working on Mars. Soon after she landed on Mars, Curiosity’s fans and followers started talking in  a geeky language of their own, and started using phrases like “Doing a science!” to explain what Curiosity is up to, as if it’s something revolutionary and new…

OI!!! Opportunity has been “Doing a science!” almost every day for NINE YEARS!!! She was “Doing a science” before Curiosity was even a sketch on a piece of paper!

I don’t mean to disrespect MSL or her team by saying that, absolutely not. I just think it’s important today, on the ninth anniversary of her landing, to remember and celebrate the fact that Opportunity is now standing tall and proud on the eastern flank of Cape York, very likely standing on rocks containing ancient clays. That’s what she was hoping to find on the rim of Endeavour crater when she set off for it, and it looks like she might have succeeded. It’s an incredible, incredible thing – but it’s going largely unnoticed, and I think that’s wrong. NASA are noting the anniversary, some might say in a rather quiet way. And personally I’m amazed and disappointed that no new HiRISE was taken of Oppy to mark the anniversary, but maybe that’s in the pipeline. I hope so!

I mean, come on… look at how far she’s driven on Mars…

The first red line on that animation shows how far it was hoped Oppy would drive on Mars before she perished. The second line shows how far she’s actually driven..!

Two possible futures await Opportunity, and the future she enjoys will be dictated by the choices we make in our immediate future. If, instead of turning our backs on it, we truly set our sights on Mars, if we send more unmanned probes there – to actually look for life and not just scrape, brush, photograph and drill rocks – then the Mars of the 22nd Century will be a settled Mars, a second home for Mankind. On that Mars, Opportunity – like every other probe sent to Mars – will be treasured and cherished, housed in a museum after being plucked from the side of Endeavour. Kept spotlessly clean by volunteers, lit by soft floodlights, seen by thousands of people from dozens of worlds, moons, asteroids and outposts scattered throughout the solar system, she will be considered by martians as important and historic an artefact as the Wright Flyer and the Apollo 11 capsule are by people today. That’s the future I want for her. That’s the future she deserves.

But…

If we turn our backs on Mars, if we don’t start going there to do something *useful*, something epic, soon, like going there and seriously looking for signs of life, past or present, then we may very well lose Mars altogether, because the public, who pay the bills remember, will stop buying the arguments about the need to understand Mars’ geology and past, will stop buying the scientists’ claims that learning about Mars’ weather and internal structure will help our lives here on Earth and will just lose interest in Mars, and will stop supporting our exploration of it. Should that happen it will be a century before human eyes even see Opportunity again, and when they do they’ll find her half-covered in dust, sticking out of the ground like the remains of the bloody Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of The Apes.

So, wherever you are tonight, spare a moment to think about Opportunity, standing there, on the eastern flank of Cape York, looking out across Endeavour Crater to the crater-pocked mountains on her farside. She’s been on Mars for nine long, lonely years, and is now starting her tenth year on the red planet. Just think about that. That’s an amazing thing, an incredible thing, andwe’re really not celebrating it enough today.

Thank you Oppy, for all you’ve done and all you’ve shown us.

But you know what?

I think your greatest glories are still ahead of you.

Go get them!

Nope! Just a combination of having to work over the so-called “holidays”, and having to organise a whole bunch of events here in Kendal as my astronomy society’s contribution to the BBC’s “STARGAZING LIVE” season meant I had to put both this and my Curiosity blog side for a wee while. But now we’re back! A new year, and soon another anniversary for Opportunity – before the end of the month she’ll be celebrating the 9th anniversary of her landing on Mars. Yes, 9 years!!!! You can be sure we’ve something special planned for that…

In the meantime, let’s catch up wuith what Oppy as been doing since you last dropped by.

Easy answer – not a lot. She hasn’t moved much from where she was – is still high up on the eastern flank of Cape York, studying plates and outcrops of rock which, it seems, bear some of those precious clays the rover was sent to look for on this part of the Cape. Let’s take a look at what she’s seeing… as ever, click on the images to enlarge them, which now entails clicking on a link above the picture itself when it pops up solo on your screen…

In the centre of that image there, the high hill is the peak of Cape Tribulation. One day, when she’s finished snuffling and scruffling about here on the Cape, Oppy will drive up there and enjoy a grandstand view of Endeavour crater…

Slightly narrower angle view of the same scene…

Looking back at Oppy’s own tracks leading up from the lower regions of the Cape…

Lots of fascinating geology in this area, which explains why Oppy has been here for the past million years… no, not really that long, it just feels that long…!

This next view shows the rocky ledge/outcrop Opportunity is studying in detail at the moment…

…and what does that look like in colour? Well, a lot like this…

I wonder how much longer Oppy will stay here? She must be getting itchy wheels by now…

Thanks for coming back, and for continuing to support Oppy’s mission, and the amazing team behind her. I think 2013 is going to be Oppy’s most incredible year so far…

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Click here to see the complete report.

As you can see from the above picture, Oppy has stopped driving after her long, circular trek, and is now parked up quite happily at a very rough-looking outcrop high on the eastern flank of Cape York. She recently extended her robot arm to take a close look at the surface of the rock, and used her microscopic imager to take detailed pictures of it, pictures which I assembled into one single picture, below. And beneath that, a 3D view of Oppy’s robot arm investigating the outcrop. Please note: for some reason, WordPress has changed the way it displays images when you click on them to enlarge them. When you now click on an image here, you’ll be taken to a version of it that looks no bigger, but if you look above it there’s some text and one of the tabs there lets you enlarge the image to its full size. Go have a play!

Think we’re going to be here for a while, so settle back everyone.