January 4, 2004
Healthy Rover
Shows Its New Neighborhood on Mars
NASA's Spirit Rover is starting to examine
its new surroundings, revealing a vast flatland well suited to
the robot's unprecedented mobility and scientific toolkit.
"Spirit has told us that it is healthy,"
Jennifer Trosper of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif., said today. Trosper is Spirit mission manager for operations
on Mars' surface. The rover remains perched on its lander platform,
and the next nine days or more will be spent preparing for egress,
or rolling off, onto the martian surface.
With only two degrees of tilt, with the
deck toward the front an average of only about 37 centimeters
(15 inches) off the ground, and with apparently no large rocks
blocking the way, the lander is in good position for egress.
"The egress path we're working toward is straight ahead,"
Trosper said.
The rover's initial images excited scientists
about the prospects of exploring the region after the roll-off.
View above Spirit
Click
for larger image
Courtesy NASA/JPL
"My hat is off to the navigation team
because they did a fantastic job of getting us right where we
wanted to be," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University,
Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the science payload.
By correlating images taken by Spirit with earlier images from
spacecraft orbiting Mars, the mission team has determined that
the rover appears to be in a region marked with numerous swaths
where dust devils have removed brighter dust and left darker
gravel behind.
"This is our new neighborhood,"
Squyres said. "We hit the sweet spot. We wanted someplace
where the wind had cleared off the rocks for us. We've landed
in a place that's so thick with dust devil tracks that a lot
of the dust has been blown away."
The terrain looks different from any of
the sites examined by NASA's three previous successful landers
-- the two Vikings in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder in 1997.
"What we're seeing is a section of
surface that is remarkably devoid of big boulders, at least in
our immediate vicinity, and that's good news because big boulders
are something we would have trouble driving over," Squyres
said. "We see a rock population that is different from anything
we've seen elsewhere on Mars, and it comes out very much in our
favor."
Spirit arrived at Mars Jan. 3 (EST and
PST; Jan. 4 Universal Time) after a seven month journey. Its
task is to spend the next three months exploring for clues in
rocks and soil about whether the past environment at this part
of Mars was ever watery and suitable to sustain life.
Spirit's twin Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity,
will reach its landing site on the opposite side of Mars on Jan.
25 (EST and Universal Time; Jan. 24 PST) to begin a similar examination
of a site on the opposite side of the planet from Gusev Crater.
Source: NASA/JPL
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