Opportunity Nears Victoria Crater’s Edge

This will be a big week for NASA space scientists as the Mars rover Opportunity completes a nearly 2-year effort to reach Victoria Crater.

Opportunity this week is expected to peer into the 200-foot-deep impact crater than one NASA scientist has compared to a Martian history book.

NASA says the great lure of Victoria is the expectation that a thick stack of rocky layers will be exposed in the crater’s walls, potentially detailing centuries of the planet’s geological history.

Scientists hope to position the robotic geologist on the edge of the crafter so it can take panoramic pictures of the entire area.

The rover Tuesday was headed toward a small notch at the edge of the crater. Once there, Opportunity is to begin creating a high-definition color mosaic to provide geologic details of the crater’s walls.

The rover is managed from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology.