Charles Elachi, director of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, which built and operates Spirit said: “Less than 24 hours ago, President Bush committed our nation to a sustained mission of space exploration. We at NASA move awfully fast. We have six wheels in the dirt. Mars is our sandbox and we’re ready to play and work.”
Though the first drive took just 78 seconds, at a speed of 4cm per second, Spirit then had to turn its main antenna towards Earth before it could confirm its new position and send back pictures. Scientists at mission control cheered as the good news arrived at 9.50 am GMT.
Russia could send a man to Mars at a tenth of the cost of American plans, according to one of Russia’s top space officials, Leonid Gorshkov, the chief designer of the state-controlled Energia company, which built the core of the International Space Station and now wants to re-enter the space race. “Technically, the first flight to Mars could be made in 2014,” Dr Gorshkov said.
Today Spirit’s science team will join European colleagues in an unprecedented experiment when Europe’s Mars Express orbiter flies directly overhead. Spirit will look up into the Martian atmosphere with its panoramic cameras and a thermal emissions spectrometer while Mars Express looks at the same portion from above with its instruments. Data from the spacecraft will be combined to create the most comprehensive picture yet of the atmosphere on Mars.
Spirit’s sister rover, Opportunity, is scheduled to land next Sunday at the Meridiani Planum region of Mars.
On 25 January 2004, a second NASA robotic probe landed on Mars and began to send back pictures. The next day Mark Henderson reported in The Times:
A dark and mysterious side to Mars that has never been seen before was revealed by NASA’s Opportunity rover yesterday in a remarkable series of pictures beamed to Earth within hours of its faultless landing.
The images of Meridiani Planum, where NASA’s second robotic probe touched down at 5.05 am, show a strange plain covered in fine-grain maroon soil much darker than anything yet observed on Mars, and an outcrop of grey bedrock that could offer clues to the planet’s geological past.
These odd features are ideal for the rover’s mission – the search for evidence that the planet was once wet and suitable for life – and led one scientist to describe the landing site as “the promised land”.
The slabs of protruding rock could contain grey haematite, a form of iron oxide that is normally formed in the presence of water. They are the rover’s most likely first target. Meridiani Planum was chosen for Opportunity’s landing as orbiting spacecraft had picked up traces of the mineral in the region. Steve Squyres, the rover missions’ chief scientist, said that he was flabbergasted by the pictures, which look different from those taken by Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, at Gusev Crater.
“Opportunity has touched down in a bizarre, alien landscape,” he said. “I’m astonished. I’m blown away. It looks like nothing that I’ve ever seen in my life. Holy smokes, I’ve got nothing else to say.”
The rover’s textbook landing brightened the mood at NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the team has been working furiously since Wednesday to diagnose and correct a potentially catastrophic fault aboard Spirit, which landed three weeks ago.
Engineers said that they had established the root cause of its problems and had stabilised the robot by switching off a malfuctioning memory system.
Even so, it may be three weeks or more before Spirit can resume scientific investigations, and the memory problem may prevent it from recovering full operational capacity.
Mission control had said that it could take 22 hours for Opportunity to make contact with Earth following its scheduled arrival at 5.05 am, but the rover sent signals within moments of landing. Scientists cheered, and were congratulated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, and former Vice President Al Gore, who joined the vigil at the laboratory.
Sean O’Keefe, the NASA administrator, saluted his team for landing both rovers successfully, and for beating the “Mars jinx under which two thirds of all missions to the planet have failed. What a night,” he said as he broke open champagne for a second time in three weeks. “No one dared hope that both rover landings would be so successful.”
While Spirit landed on the base petal of its protective pyramidal shell, Opportunity landed on a side petal and had to be flipped into an upright position.
All the airbags that cushioned it on landing appear to have been successfully retracted. One of Spirit’s airbags refused to deflate properly forcing engineers to turn the rover 120 degrees before it could be driven away from the landing module.
British scientists will today begin one of their final attempts to find their missing Beagle 2 lander. The team has not tried to contact the probe for almost two weeks to try to force it into an emergency transmission mode.
On 27 January 2004, Mark Henderson reported in The Times:
NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has landed in a small crater, to the delight of scientists who hope that it will provide a ready made window into the planet’s geological past.
The shallow crater, about 65ft across, was formed by a meteor impact, which has performed natural excavation work allowing the rover to peer below the Martian surface without having to dig.
Steve Squyres of Cornell University, lead scientist for the Mars rovers, said that the crater was ideaclass="underline" big enough to be of great scientific interest but not so deep that the six wheeled robot would be stranded. “We have scored a 300 million mile interplanetary hole in one,” he said. The rover will spend at least a week unfolding itself before leaving its landing module.
British scientists have begun a post-mortem examination into the failure of Beagle 2. Colin Pillinger, the mission’s chief scientist, said yesterday that his team accepted the probable loss.
Direct evidence that Mars was once awash with liquid water has been discovered for the first time, proving that life could once have existed on the planet and may still be there.
NASA scientists announced last night that the Opportunity rover had determined that the rocks of its Meridiani Planum landing site had been soaked in liquid water, the prerequisite of life on Earth.
The startling findings show unequivocally that at least part of the Red Planet has been wet and habitable in the past, with conditions suitable for living organisms to evolve and survive.
Steve Squyres, chief scientist for NASA’s rover mission, said that while the discovery does not prove that life had ever existed on Mars, it shows beyond doubt that it is a real possibility.
“The purpose of going to Mars was to see whether or not it was a habitable environment,” he said. “We believe that this place, in Meridiani Planum, at some point in time was habitable. That doesn’t mean life was there, but it is a place that was habitable at one time.”
James Garvin, NASA’s lead scientist for Mars exploration, said, “NASA launched the Mars Exploration Rover mission specifically to check whether at least one part of Mars ever had a persistently wet environment that could possibly have been hospitable to life. Today we have strong evidence for an exciting answer – ‘yes’.”
Observations from orbit, most recently from the European Mars Express spacecraft, have shown that frozen water exists at the Red Planet’s poles. Probes have also photographed geological features such as canyons and dried-up beds that appear to have been carved by rivers, oceans and lakes.
Water, however, must exist in its liquid form to sustain life, and no direct evidence of this had been found before Opportunity’s investigations.