January 29, 2004
Spirit Gets
Back to Work While Opportunity Gears Up
NASA's Spirit rover on Mars has resumed taking
pictures as engineers continue work on restoring its health.
Meanwhile, Spirit's twin, Opportunity, extended its rear wheels
backward to driving position last night as part of preparations
to roll off its lander, possibly as early as overnight Saturday-to-Sunday.
Spirit shot and transmitted a picture yesterday
to show the position of its robotic arm. "The arm is exactly
where we expected," Jennifer Trosper, mission manager at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said.
Spirit's Robotic Arm Inspects
Rock
Click
for larger image
Courtesy NASA/JPL
It is still extended in the same position
as when the rover developed communication and computer problems
on Jan. 22. A mineral-identifying instrument called a Moessbauer
spectrometer, at the tip of the arm, is positioned at a rock
nicknamed Adirondack.
Engineers have been carefully nursing Spirit
back toward full operations for the past week. They are sending
commands today for the rover to begin making new scientific observations
again, starting with panoramic camera images of nearby rocks.
Today's commands also tell the rover to send data stored by two
instruments since they took readings on Adirondack last week
-- the Moessbauer spectrometer and the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer,
which identifies the chemical elements in a target.
"We know we still have some engineering
work to do, but we think we understand the problem well enough
to do science in parallel with that work," Trosper said.
Several attempts to get a full trace of data related to the rover's
problem have only partially succeeded. The engineers might choose
to reformat the rover's flash memory in the next few days.
A health check of Spirit's camera mast
is on the agenda for today. A check of an actuator motor for
a periscope mirror of the miniature thermal emission spectrometer
is planned for Friday.
Halfway around Mars from Spirit, Opportunity's
lander platform successfully tilted itself forward by pulling
airbag material under the rear portion of the lander. It then
flexed its rear petal downward., driving the front edge lower.
The tips of the reinforced fabric ramp are now in the soil.
JPL's Matt Wallace, mission manager, said,
"That makes egress look perfect. It's going to be an easy
ride."
During Opportunity's sol 6, the martian
day that started today at 10:26 a.m. PST, the rover will be commanded
to lower the middle pair of its six wheels and to release its
robotic arm from the latch that has held it since before launch.
Yesterday, Opportunity used its minature
thermal emission spectrometer on a portion of the landing neighborhood
that includes a rock outcrop. The instrument identifies the composition
of rocks and soils from a distance. Opportunity did not return
the data from those observations before going to sleep for the
martian night, but may later today.
The rovers' main task in coming weeks and
months is to explore their landing sites for evidence in the
rocks and soil about whether the sites' past environments were
ever watery and possibly suitable for sustaining life.
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