Opportunity Ready To Make Its Great Escape

by Steve Squyres for Athena Cornell
Pasadena CA (JPL) May 10, 2005
This has been a long, hard week of testing. We tested with one mix of materials, decided it wasn't quite nasty enough, and then made the mix nastier and tested again. We tested getting the rover stuck and then unstuck in a bunch of different configurations, some of which we think were worse than the one we've gotten ourselves into on Mars.

Rover engineers check how a test rover moves in material chosen to simulate some difficult Mars driving conditions. The scene is inside the In-Situ Instrument Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. These tests in early May 2005 were designed to help plan the best way for the rover Opportunity to drive off of a soft-sand dune that the rover dug itself into the previous week. The mixture of sandy and powdery material brought in for these specific tests matched the way the soil underneath Opportunity caked onto wheels, filling the spaces between the cleats on the wheels.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL. (editor: does this "soil" look like corn starch to you?)

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