Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/mars-rover-begins-exploration-of-key-crater Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript The Mars rover Opportunity reached the rim of the Victoria Crater on Mars, capturing new images of a 900-meter depression that could reveal information about the possibility of life on the Red Planet. Principal scientist Steve Squyres discusses the mission's findings. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JEFFREY BROWN: When two solar-powered rovers began their exploration of Mars in early 2004, scientists hoped the vehicles would operate for 90 days. Now, some 900 days later, "Opportunity" and "Spirit" are still at it, offering an exciting window on the planet's present and past.While "Spirit" monitors the Martian climate south of the equator, its twin, "Opportunity," has reached the edge of a 200-foot-deep, half-mile-wide crater named Victoria. And scientists are calling this the most spectacular moment yet in the mission.Among those very excited scientists is Steve Squyres, the mission's principal investigator and a professor of astronomy at Cornell University.Welcome back to our program. STEVE SQUYRES, Mars Rover Project: Hi, glad to be here. JEFFREY BROWN: Why is looking at this particular crater, Victoria, so important? STEVE SQUYRES: Well, the rocks at this place are layered, like a stack of pancakes. And for two years, we've been driving around on top of that stack without being able to see inside it. What this big hole in the ground does for us is let us see what's down in that stack of layers and what those rocks have to tell us about the past history of Mars. JEFFREY BROWN: So you've got some early pictures here. Tell us about them. Tell us what you're seeing. STEVE SQUYRES: Well, what these images do initially is just simply reveal the scope of this crater. We're going to later be taking much higher-resolution pictures in color. This is our first glimpse. We literally just got here a couple days ago.But what they show is cliffs 50 to 100 feet high, a very deep, bowl-shaped crater, a sand dune field down in the bottom. What gets us excited, as scientists — I mean, aside from just the sheer spectacle of this view — is these cliffs show an enormous deep sequence of layered rocks.And what that means is, if we can get to those rocks and get to them up close and measure their composition, we can learn a lot about what conditions were like when the rocks formed.