NASA's Opportunity celebrates 5,000 days on Mars

 NASA's long-lived Mars rover Opportunity has just rolled past another big milestone — 5,000 days on the Red Planet.
The golf-cart-size Opportunity touched down on Mars in January 2004, on a mission that was originally envisioned to last just 90 Martian days. (And we're talking here about Martian days, or "sols," each of which is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day.)
And today (Feb. 16) is sol number 5,000.

"Five thousand sols after the start of our 90-sol mission, this amazing rover is still showing us surprises on Mars," Opportunity Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California
Mission team members just reported one more such surprise — a network of possible "rock stripes" in Perseverance Valley, a channel that cuts through the western rim of the Red Planet's 14-mile-wide (22 kilometers) Endeavour Crater.
Opportunity's photos reveal that dirt and gravel have been arranged into apparent stripes, perhaps by wind, downhill tumbling, repeated cycling of freezing and thawing over the eons, or a combination of these factors, rover team members said. (Scientists think that Mars' obliquity, or axial tilt, has varied a great deal over the past few million years, causing substantial climate swings.)
"Debris from relatively fresh impact craters is scattered over the surface of the area, complicating assessment of effects of wind," Opportunity science-team member Robert Sullivan, of Cornell University, said in a different statement. "I don't know what these stripes are, and I don't think anyone else knows for sure what they are, so we're entertaining multiple hypotheses and gathering more data to figure it out."

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