As it entered its fifth year of Mars exploration, NASA’s Opportunity Mars continued to perform tests and investigate the patches of dust on the surface of the Red Planet. However, after spending the past two years exploring the Victoria Crater, the Mars rover will be moving towards an even bigger crater, called Endeavour, southeast from its current position.

According to NASA, Opportunity will need to travel 12 kilometers (7 miles) to reach the Endeavour Crater, which also accounts for the total distance traveled since the March 2004 landing on the Red Planet.

Even though there is no guarantee that this will be a successful mission, scientists appear to be very intrigued by this very large crater. “We may not get there, but it is scientifically the right direction to go anyway,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for the rover.

Scientists’ expectations grow bigger as they imagine they may find a greater diversity of rock layers than in the Victoria Crater. Although they may not reach the Endeavour Crater, scientists are enthusiastic about finding younger layers of rocks as the Opportunity rover begins moving south.

Further south, Opportunity is expected to encounter fairly larger craters, which scientists believe are sources of cobbles they are interested in examining. “Some of the cobbles are samples of layers deeper than Opportunity will ever see, and we expect to find more cobbles as we head toward the south,” Squires explained.

Seven Miles may not seem much, however scientists explain this will be a long journey for Opportunity, which might take two years, if Opportunity will travel 110 yards on a daily basis. This of course raises a lot of questions on whether Opportunity will be able to reach the crater, since it might also be heading towards the end of its mission here on Mars, considering its prolonged time here.

“This is a bolder, more aggressive objective than we have had before,” said John Callas, project managers for Opportunity and Spirit rovers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “It’s tremendously exciting. It’s new science. It’s the next great challenge for these robotic explorers.”

With the help of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists will try to identify the obstacles that might get in the way of the Opportunity rover.

At the beginning of this month, Opportunity was still investigating patches of dust, however, after concluding that the dust was not pure enough , the team of scientists in charge of the Mars mission decided it was time to move on to a more promising area.

The Opportunity Mars rover spent 430 Martian Days in the Victoria Crater, before climbing out of it on August 28. NASA also reported that Opportunity did not leave without saying good-bye to Victoria. As it appears, Opportunity lifted its robotic arms and saluted before heading for its next target.