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Robot ready to search for signs of life on Mars

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 January 2004, 06:00 CST

THE search for signs of life on Mars could start today as Nasa's six-wheeled robot was expected to take its first tentative steps in the exploration of the red planet.

Scientists were considering their next step as the rover vehicle continued to beam back black-and-white and colour photographs of the pancake-flat plain where it landed.

As early as today, the Spirit probe could be told to raise itself up and extend its front legs, beginning the mapping of what scientists believe is the rocky bed of an ancient lake that may have once harboured life.

The golf cart-sized Spirit landed on Mars late on Saturday, safely returning the US space agency to the planet's surface for the first time since the 1997 Pathfinder mission.

Julie Townsend, a mission avionics engineer, said: "It was so gorgeous to see the horizon in the pictures. It's what we'd been imagining for so long."

The first images from Spirit show a flat, wind-scoured plain peppered with small rocks, none more than a foot high.

The scene enthused scientists, eager to send the rover prospecting among the rocks for evidence that the landing site was once awash in water. Wendy Calvin, of the University of Nevada, a scientist on the mission, said the terrain appeared flatter and featured fewer and smaller rocks than the sites that Pathfinder and, in 1976, the twin Viking landers visited.

Nasa has successfully established a link from Earth with Spirit's high-gain antenna that will allow data to be sent from Mars at transmission rates greater than 11,000 bits per second, about one- fifth the rate of a 56K dial-up connection to the internet on Earth.

Spirit's fastest connection, at 128K, is expected to be through its UHF antenna. The antenna transmits data to the Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft for later relay to Earth. The two satellites are in orbit around Mars.

The (pounds) 500m Nasa Mars Exploration Rover project also includes a twin golf cart-sized rover, Opportunity.

Spirit made an apparently flawless landing in Gusev crater.

Scientists were trying to determine whether a dark object lodged against one corner of the lander was a rock that might block the rover once it is ready to move.

Over the next three months, the robot geologist should look for geologic evidence of past water activity in the rocks and soil. If water once filled Gusev crater, it may have been a place suitable for life.

It will take nine to 10 days before the six-wheeled robot is ready to roll off its lander and start roaming Mars.

British scientists will continue trying to contact the Beagle 2 probe, which was supposed to land on Mars on Christmas Day but has not been heard from since.

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