Opportunity is halfway down in "Perseverance Valley" on the west rim of Endeavour Crater.

A nearby, regional dust storm is affecting Opportunity. The first indication of a dust storm 621.37 miles (1000 kilometers) away from Opportunity was received on Friday evening, well after the three-sol plan to operate Opportunity through the weekend was developed.

Subsequent weather reports from Mars by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Color Imager (MARCI) team indicated a persisting storm, but still well away from Opportunity but affecting the atmospheric opacity over the rover site.

In response, on Monday, June 4, 2018 and Tuesday, June 5, 2018 (Sols 5106 and 5107), two low-power plans were developed for Opportunity. Since then the atmosphere over the rover has continued to deteriorate.

On Sol 5105 (June 3, 2018; the last sol of the weekend plan), Opportunity's solar arrays generated 468 watt-hours of energy with an atmospheric opacity (tau) of around 1.0.

On Sol 5106 (June 4, 2018), energy was down to 345 watt-hours with a tau of 2.1. Additionally, on Sol 5107 (June 6, 2018), the energy dropped further to 133 watt-hours. We were unable to get a measurement of tau on Sol 5107 (June 6, 2018), but it is estimated to be above 3.0. Opportunity has not seen this level of atmospheric opacity in over a decade.

In Sol 5108 (June 7, 2018) the rover team crafted a minimum-power two-sol plan, where the rover wakes on the first sol only to receive the morning commands then sleeps to the next sol with a brief wake-up in the morning. Subsequently, naps until the afternoon for a quick atmospheric measurement with the Panoramic Camera (Pancam) then a brief communication session with MRO and back to sleep.

The confirming beep on the receipt of the command load was received Thursday morning, but the next time to hear from the rover will be Friday morning. The rover team will likely continue this low-power strategy for Opportunity until conditions improve.

Total odometry is 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers).

Related Links
Opportunity Archive at JPL
Mars News and Information at MarsDaily.com
Lunar Dreams and more

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Mars rover Opportunity hunkers down during dust storm
Pasadena CA (JPL) Jun 11, 2018
Science operations for NASA's Opportunity rover have been temporarily suspended as it waits out a growing dust storm on Mars. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter first detected the storm on Friday, June 1. As soon as the orbiter team saw how close the storm was to Opportunity, they notified the rover's team to begin preparing contingency plans. In a matter of days, the storm had ballooned. It now spans more than 7 million square miles (18 million square kilometers) - an area greater than Nort ... read more