AFTER hovering tantalisingly for months at the edge of a gorgeous Martian crater called Victoria, NASA’s Opportunity rover will finally head down into it.
Opportunity reached the rim of the 800-metre-wide Victoria crater in September 2006. Now the rover is set to tentatively dip into the crater on 7 or 9 July from a spot on the rim called Duck Bay. This has the shallowest slope of all the potential entrances to the crater, according to rover project manager John Callas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“Of course there are risks,” says Callas, pointing out that the terrain could be harder for the…
