Spirit Ready to Drive onto Mars Surface
January 14, 2004
NASA's Spirit completed a three-stage turn early today, the last
step before a drive planned early Thursday to take the rover off its
lander platform and onto martian soil for the first time.
"We are very excited about where we are today. We've just completed
the exploration of our lander and we're ready to explore Mars," said
Kevin Burke of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.,
leader of the engineering team that planned the rover's egress from
the lander. "We are headed in a north-northwest direction. That is
our exit path, and we're sitting just where we want to be."
Late tonight, mission managers at JPL plan to send the command for
Spirit to drive forward 3 meters (10 feet), enough to get all six
wheels onto the soil.
After the move, one of the rover's first jobs will be to locate the
Sun with its panoramic camera and calculate from the Sun's position
how to point its main antenna at Earth, JPL's Jennifer Trosper,
mission manager, explained.
On Friday, Spirit's science team will take advantage of special
possibilities presented by the European Space Agency's Mars Express
orbiter flying almost directly overhead, about 300 kilometers (186
miles) high. Mars Express successfully entered orbit around Mars
last month. Spirit will be looking up while Mars Express uses three
instruments to look down.
"This is an historic opportunity," said Dr. Ray Arvidson of
Washington University in St. Louis, deputy principal investigator
for the science instruments on Spirit and on its twin Mars
Exploration Rover, Opportunity. "The intent is to get observations
from above and to get observations from below at the same time to do
the best possible job of determining the dynamics of the
atmosphere." The Mars Express observations are also expected to
supplement earlier information from two NASA Mars orbiters about the
surface minerals and landforms in Spirit's neighborhood within Gusev
Crater.
Mars Express will be looking down with a high-resolution stereo
camera, a spectrometer for identifying minerals in infrared and
visible wavelengths, and another spectrometer for studying
atmospheric circulation and composition. Spirit will be looking up
with its panoramic camera and its infrared spectrometer.
Dr. Michael Smith of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt,
Md., reported how Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer
can be used to assess the temperatures in Mars' atmosphere from near
the planet's surface to several kilometers or miles high. Spirit's
measurements are most sensitive for the lower portion of the
atmosphere, while Mars Express' measurements will be most sensitive
for the upper atmosphere, he said.
Spirit arrived at Mars Jan. 3 (EST and PST; Jan. 4 Universal
Time) after a seven-month journey. In coming weeks and months,
according to plans, it will be exploring for clues in rocks and
soil to decipher whether the past environment in Gusev Crater
was ever watery and possibly suitable to sustain life.
Opportunity will reach Mars on Jan. 25 (EST and Universal Time;
9:05 p.m., Jan. 24, PST) to begin a similar examination of a site on
the opposite side of the planet from Gusev Crater. As of Thursday
morning, Opportunity will have flown 438 million kilometers (272
million miles) since launch and will still have 18 million
kilometers (11 million miles) to go before landing.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's
Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Images and
additional information about the project are available from JPL
at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University,
Ithaca, N.Y., at http://athena.cornell.edu.
