|
|
 |
 |
| Sunday, 8 February 2004 |
 |
|
 |
World |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
Mars rovers probe soil for clues to life, water LOS ANGELES, Feb 6 The Mars rover Spirit used its robotic arm to brush dust off a rock while its twin, Opportunity, tested its wheels on the floor of the crater where it landed last month, NASA scientists said on Friday. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had slated a full weekend of activities for the golf cart-sized rovers, which are examining rocks and soil on opposite sides of the Red Planet for signs that its climate was once wetter, warmer and more hospitable to life. Spirit returned to full-time science on Thursday after engineers determined what crippled its onboard computers for nearly two weeks. Engineers put in place safeguards to prevent the problem from cropping up again in either rover. "I think I can say with as much certainty as we can say about anything here that our patient is healed," Spirit mission manager Jennifer Trosper told reporters on Friday. Engineers spent Wednesday erasing and reformatting Spirit's flash memory - used primarily to store photographs taken by the rover's onboard cameras - after it became overloaded and the team accidentally corrupted it, Trosper said. On Thursday, Spirit woke to "Back in the Saddle Again" and successfully executed commands to use a 1/2-inch stainless steel brush on its robotic arm to remove a dust coating from a rock nicknamed Adirondack. The rover then took readings of the visibly darker spot with spectrometers mounted on its arm. The team planned to use a rock abrasion tool for the first time on Friday to drill into the rock's surface and take more spectrometer readings, Trosper said. Over the weekend, Spirit will begin driving northeast across the massive Gusev Crater where it landed on Jan. 3 toward a formation the science team nicknamed the Bonneville Crater 800 feet away, she said. On Thursday, engineers put Opportunity through a short drive composed of arcs to test its traction in the small crater where it landed on the Meridiani Planum, Opportunity mission manager Matt Wallace said. The rover drove about 3-1/2 meters and ended up just short of its first science target - a low outcropping of pale bedrock in the crater's wall. Scientists want to examine a feature of the outcrop dubbed "Snout" but ended up about 1/2 meter short, possibly because the rover's wheel unexpectedly slipped in the fine, loose soil, Wallace said. "The vehicle is moving up crater's surface ... it's pitched almost 13 degrees. You get to about 10 degrees of pitch and you start to get appreciable amounts of slip," Wallace said. "Everything points to the idea that we're getting between 10 to 20 percent of slip during these traverses." Over the weekend, engineers planned to complete the drive up to Snout and to deploy Opportunity's instrument arm to test and take microscopic images of the soil and the outcropping, he said. The team planned to spend at least several days, if not longer, examining the bedrock for clues to the planet's geologic evolution. "The rover continues to operate nominally," Wallace said. "She is healthy and happy and continuing to do the job she was sent to do." The successful deployment of the twin U.S. rovers marks the first time two spacecraft have simultaneously explored on the surface of another planet. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
