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Mars Rover Expected to Probe for Evidence of Conditions Favorable to Life

Posted on: Sunday, 4 January 2004, 06:00 CST

Jan. 4--PASADENA, Calif.--A NASA robot geologist named Spirit landed on Mars late Saturday to begin a three-month mission that could reveal whether conditions favorable for life once existed there.

Once it signaled back to Earth shortly before midnight that it had landed successfully, a cheer went up from anxious scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Before starting its work, however, the golf-cart-sized rover had to survive what one official at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration dubbed "six minutes of hell" -- a fiery plunge through the planet's atmosphere, a parachute descent to 40 feet above the Martian surface, then a bouncing landing surrounded by two dozen impact-cushioning air bags.

The probe appeared to be functioning flawlessly in the hours leading up to its arrival -- so flawlessly that a final course-correction maneuver was canceled.

"This is essentially perfect navigation," said Louis D'Amario, chief of the mission's navigation team. "We couldn't have possibly hoped to do better than this. . . . This is essentially hitting the bull's-eye."

Spirit and an identical sister rover named Opportunity, scheduled to land Jan. 25 on the other side of Mars, are attempting to defy some long odds: two-thirds of humankind's previous 32 efforts to explore the Red Planet have been failures.

Despite NASA's best-laid plans, luck will play a major role in determining the success of the $820 million Spirit and Opportunity missions.

"We have done everything humanly possible to make these missions successful," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science. "But in the last six minutes of hell, all it takes is a gust of wind at the wrong time or a rock in the wrong place, and this mission could be over."

Spirit's landing site is the Gusev Crater, just south of the Martian equator. Scientists think an ancient asteroid or comet impact dug the depression, which appears to have once held a lake.

Signs of life

Rocks and sediments deposited on the floor of the crater could contain evidence of whether liquid water persisted there. The other prerequisites for life as it exists on Earth already are known to be present on Mars.

Scientists don't anticipate that Spirit will discover direct evidence of past Martian life.

"There is nothing we expect to find that will be in any way a trace of life," said Steve Squyres, a Cornell University professor and principal researcher for the mission's science instruments.

"This is not a fossil hunt. What we are really doing is trying to find the places where evidence of life might be preserved, so that when we can send much more sophisticated vehicles to return samples and bring them back to laboratories, we have the maximum chance of finding what we might be after."

To do that, the six-wheeled Spirit rover will act as a field geologist, traveling up to 65 feet in a day to examine interesting-looking rocks seen in photos taken with onboard panoramic cameras.

The first pictures are scheduled to be transmitted back to Earth today.

The 384-pound rover has navigation software and hazard-identification cameras that will allow it to autonomously make its way toward destinations identified by researchers on Earth.

Spirit is equipped with an extendable arm that has several scientific instruments: spectrometers to determine the chemical composition of surface objects. A microscope. A grinding wheel that will remove outer layers of rocks to expose the material underneath. Data gleaned by those instruments could revolutionize scientists' knowledge of Mars.

"With a vehicle like this, we are going to really be able to move around on the surface of another world in a significant way for the first time," Squyres said. "We can look off into the distance, see a hill, wonder what the view looks like from the top of that hill, then go there and find out. . . . We can really explore in the sense that you and I would use that word."

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(c) 2004. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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