NASA plans to send a Mars rover down a gully that was carved by fluid that could have been water as part of a two-year extended mission that started on Oct. 1.

The agency said Saturday its team will drive the 12-year-old Opportunity rover down the full length of the gully which is approximately as long as two football fields and half a mile away from the rover’s current location.

“Fluid-carved gullies on Mars have been seen from orbit since the 1970s, but none had been examined up close on the surface before,” said Opportunity Principal Investigator Steve Squyres.

“We hope to learn whether the fluid was a debris flow, with lots of rubble lubricated by water, or a flow with mostly water and less other material,” Squyres added.

NASA wants the rover to explore a portion of the meteor-excavated Endeavour Crater to compare rocks inside the crater to the dominant type of rock that the rover previously examined on the plains.

Squyres said the rover may find sulfate-rich rocks that were formed through a water-related process.

Opportunity will also locate and examine rocks from a geological layer that was in place before a meteor excavated Endeavour Crater, according to the agency.

The rover team might face issues during the two-year mission since Opportunity’s motors and other components have exceeded life expectancy and the rover cannot store data overnight, NASA added.

Opportunity was launched in July 2003 and ended its original mission in April 2004.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended for the Office of Personnel Management address the availability and reliability of payroll data to support other agencies and researchers.

GAO said Friday OPM has not taken steps to widen the availability of payroll data from the Enterprise Human Resources Integration system.

The lack of data availability lead federal agencies and researchers to use proxy sources that more limited in terms of scope of analysis and the level of detail required for data-driven human capital studies, GAO added.

Auditors also identified internal control weaknesses they believe affect the reliability of EHRI’s payroll data such as data error risks, incomplete data fields and ineffective monitoring.

The payroll database is one of four EHRI databases that was created to serve as a centralized, standardized and comprehensive source of pay- and leave-related data across the federal government.

Aaron Snow, executive director of the General Services Administration‘s 18F organization, will step down on Oct. 13 and hold an advisory role to support the incoming Technology Transformation Service commissioner, Federal News Radio reported Friday.

Jason Miller writes Dave Zvenyach, 18F acquisition management director, will serve as interim 18F head to replace Snow, who also holds the TTS deputy commissioner position.

“When it comes to 18F, perhaps no one has been more instrumental in establishing this organization than Aaron Snow,” GSA Administrator Denise Turner Roth said in an email to staff that Federal News Radio has obtained.

“One of the first Presidential Innovation Fellows, Aaron was one of the key contributors in building on this successful program to create 18F.”

The report said Snow entered government for a one-year term under the Presidential Innovation Fellows program before he received a two-year extension through the Office of Personnel Management‘s excepted hiring authority.

He has also served in the voter protection team for Barack Obama’s presidential and reelection campaigns.

The Department of Health and Human Services has introduced its fourth Open Government Plan that aims to make government more transparent to the public as well as discover new ways to collaborate and partner with the department’s stakeholders.

HHS Acting Deputy Secretary Mary Wakefield wrote in a blog post published Thursday the department has worked to identify projects, policies and perspectives on new methods to connect with stakeholder organizations that the department will focus on in the next two years.

HHS seeks to share data and information products with “underserved” communities to support the development of new approaches on food supply safety, early child development and disease prevention.

Wakefield noted that the plan highlights the utilization of the Open Payments program, use of new applications and data services to streamline the delivery of health data to Medicare beneficiaries and the application of the Precision Medicine Initiative that aims to boost the future of biomedical research.

She added HHS works to create a public comment database for the Physical Activity Guidelines update process that will remain open for comment over the next two years.