With the help of the Martian winds blowing up from the floor of Endeavour Crater, much of the accumulated dust on her rover’s solar arrays has been whisked away and Opportunity is literally empowered with newfound energy and ready to continue the expedition. “We went from struggling through this winter to now we’ve got crazy beautiful power margins that are so fantastic,” said Lever. “We’re just running on all cylinders right now.”

As February wound down, Opportunity was completing her imaging of everything in sight from a parked position in between the north and south troughs. The rover is slated to drive in March, probably over to rocks exposed at the tip of a feature the scientists are informally calling ‘the island,’ a rock-rich target that from the rover planners’ (RPs’) perspective is easiest for the rover to get to for close-up work.

It may be that Opportunity is getting a little farther into another ancient scene that just may lead the mission farther back in Martian geological time, deeper into the Noachian Period some 3.7 to 4.2 billion years ago when Mars had water and was more like Earth. The rover and the scientists are still investigating any and all interesting clues they can find in Perseverance Valley, clues that eventually will tell them if this place was carved by water or ice, or wind or maybe some kind of debris flow.

“We have been looking forward to Endeavour Crater for so long and driving into it as we have has been breathtaking,” said Barbara Cohen, of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, a member of the MER science team. “Every time we get a new vantage point, it’s just breathtaking. I think there’s a lot more geological diversity in Perseverance Valley than we expected. We hoped for more with Endeavour. The fact it’s delivering is just fantastic.”

In recent weeks, Opportunity has been sending home images of rocks distinguished by their rough, pitted exterior that could, perhaps, indicate a volcanic origin, along with images of terrain surfaces that look like stone stripes, little formations where the soil and gravel particles appear to have become organized into narrow rows or corrugations parallel to the slope, alternating between rows with more gravel and rows with less. These rocks and the stone stripes may be hints that the mission is driving deeper into Mars’ geological history.

“We don’t know what happened here yet,” cautioned Arvidson. “But we’re going to take our time to find out what’s going on.” The general plan forward and the objective remain the same. “It’s all about continuing downhill and looking at the morphological features, the chemistry, and the fine scale details, the sediment fill and the modern fill, and the stone stripes to decipher what’s going on, what formed this valley.”

As grand a day as Sol 5000 was, the mission has moved on. Because that’s what this rover and this team do. “Here all is well,” emailed Rover Planner Paolo Bellutta, as he worked on planning the next drives at month’s end. “I got my Guinness World record certificate for longest driven distance on Mars, we completed the selfie on 5006, and we continue working.”

Opportunity is budgeted to keep exploring Endeavour through 2018. At NASA HQ’s request, the MER team officials are preparing an 11th mission extension proposal for 2019. [From that point, mission extensions, according to reports, will be submitted every three years as opposed to every two as it is now and has previously been.]

“If everything goes well,” summed up Squyres, “we should be here next year with a bigger number of completed sols, more cool stuff to talk about, and a plan for the next mission extension.”