Postcards from Mars

A traveling robotic geologist has flown 302.6 million miles, landed on Mars, and returned stunning images of the area around its landing site in Gusev Crater.

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully sent a radio signal after the spacecraft had bounced and rolled for several minutes following its initial impact at 8:35 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 3.

“This is a big night for NASA,” said NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe. “We’re back. I am very, very proud of this team, and we’re on Mars.”

Members of the mission’s flight team at JPL cheered when they learned that NASA’s Deep Space Network had received a postlanding signal from Spirit. The cheering resumed about three hours later when the rover transmitted its first images to Earth.

“We’ve got many steps to go before this mission is over, but we’ve retired a lot of risk with this landing,” said Pete Theisinger, JPL project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project.

JPL’s Richard Cook, deputy project manager for the rovers, said, “We’re certainly looking forward to Opportunity landing three weeks from now.” Opportunity is Spirit’s twin rover, launched July 7 and due to land on the opposite side of Mars on January 25.

Charles Elachi, JPL director, said, “To achieve this mission, we have assembled the best team of young women and men this country can put together. Essential work was done by other NASA centers and by our industrial and academic partners.”

NASA chose the landing site based on evidence from Mars orbiters that the Connecticut-sized Gusev Crater may have held a lake long ago. A long, deep valley, apparently carved by ancient flows of water, leads into Gusev. Spirit will spend the next three months exploring for clues in rocks and soil as to whether the area’s past environment was ever watery and able to sustain life.

The flight team expects to spend more than a week directing Spirit through a series of preparation steps before the rover rolls off its lander platform. Meanwhile, Spirit’s cameras and a mineral-identifying infrared instrument have begun examining the surrounding terrain, revealing a vast flatland well suited to the robot’s unprecedented mobility and scientific tool kit.

“My hat is off to the navigation team because they did a fantastic job of getting us right where we wanted to be,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for the science payload.

“We hit the sweet spot,” he said. “We wanted someplace where the wind had cleared off the rocks for us. . . . 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.”

“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,” he said.

More information and images are available at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov.
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