Perhaps it would be more appropriate to celebrate the anniversaries in terms of Martian years but obviously it’s easier to use the Earth’s ones. On January 25, 2004, the Mars Rover Opportunity reached the red planet and after eight Earth years it keeps on working.

Now the Mars Rover Opportunity is enduring winter so it was parked on the western rim of Endeavour Crater in a place informally called “Greeley Haven” in honor of geologist Ronald Greeley to enable it to get enough energy from its solar panels to avoid freezing.

In recent months, Opportunity performed several tests in the area and in September it found a rock containing much zinc, which on Earth can be found in rocks that have been exposed to very hot water. A few weeks later, the Mars Rover found a vein of mineral identified as hydrated calcium sulphate, a further indication that in the past there was water, which allegedly caused the hydration.

Now that the Mars rover Opportunity stopped at Greeley Haven, its investigation will be of a different kind. First of all, scientists scheduled an analysis of Mars interior tracking radio signals emitted by Opportunity to measure the wobble in the rotation of the planet. The amount of wobble will indicate whether the core of Mars is molten.

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Another research started in Greeley Haven consists in a spectrometric analysis of minerals nearby. The Mössbauer spectrometer of the Mars Rover Opportunity uses the radiation emitted by the cobalt-57 in the instrument but as the half-life of this element is only nine months its quantity has been greatly reduced over the years. When Opportunity had just arrived on Mars, it could perform that kind of analysis in less than an hour but now it will take a few weeks keeping the spectrometer focused on the minerals to be analyzed.

Further research carried out by the Mars Rover Opportunity during the Martian winter consists in monitoring the wind. When the Rover is in motion it’s difficult to assess the effects of winds, especially on a small scale, but now that it stopped it can check the position of individual grains of sand next to it.

The Soviet robot Lunokhod 2 holds the record for the distance traveled on the surface of another world with 37 kilometers (23 miles) on the moon in 1973. The Mars Rover Opportunity has traveled so far 34.4 kilometers (21.35 miles) and after the winter can travel again and break that record as well. It would be a further source of pride for this amazing machine.