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Second Rover Transmits Mars Crater Photo

Posted on: Monday, 26 January 2004, 06:00 CST

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - NASA's Opportunity rover on Monday sent its first color "postcard" from the crater on Mars where it landed during the weekend, as engineers prepared to begin purging computer files on the spacecraft's hobbled twin to restore its health.

The new image from Opportunity shows the smooth, brick-red slopes of a shallow crater, broken up by a fragmented slab of bedrock that has excited scientists.

"It's going to be a wonderful area for geologists to explore with our rover," said Jim Bell, of Cornell University and the main scientist on Opportunity's panoramic camera.

Opportunity began sending images to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory about four hours after it bounced to a landing late Saturday on the opposite side of the Red Planet from its temporarily crippled twin, Spirit.

Bounce marks left by the rover's air bags when it landed were clearly visible. Mars at the time was 124 million miles from Earth.

"The pictures just blow me away. We've certainly not been to this place before," deputy project manager Richard Cook said.

Opportunity plunged into the martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph and bounced down on Mars just six minutes later, swaddled in protective air bags. It hit with a force estimated to be just two to three times that of Earth's gravity. Engineers had designed it to withstand as much as 40 Gs, said Chris Jones, director of flight projects at JPL.

The six-wheeled rover landed at 9:05 p.m. PST in Meridiani Planum, believed to be the smoothest, flattest spot on Mars. Opportunity lies 6,600 miles and halfway around the planet from where its twin, Spirit, landed on Jan. 3.

On Monday, NASA said Opportunity was in excellent health and Spirit was on the mend after a serious software problems had hobbled it.

Opportunity landed in a crater roughly 20 yards across and rimmed with gentle slopes that shouldn't block the rolling robot once it gets going, said Steve Squyres, of Cornell and the mission's main scientist.

Opportunity could roll off its lander in 10 to 14 days' time, mission manager Arthur Amador said. Opportunity's possible targets include a larger crater, maybe 500 feet across, that lies an estimated half-mile from where the spacecraft landed.

The rover's ramp off its lander also appeared unobstructed, unlike Spirit's landing, when a deflated air bag blocked its safest route to the martian surface, said Matt Wallace, another of the mission managers.

Together, the twin 384-pound rovers make up a $820 million mission to seek out geologic evidence that Mars was once a wetter world possibly capable of sustaining life. NASA launched Spirit on June 10 and Opportunity on July 7. Each carries nine cameras and six scientific instruments.

On Wednesday, Spirit developed serious problems, cutting off what had been a steady flow of pictures and scientific data.

Engineers believe Spirit has too little random-access memory to adequately manage its flash memory. They temporarily disabled Spirit's flash memory to ease the burden on its random-access memory, ending a looping sequence of computer reboots that had plagued the spacecraft, mission manager Jennifer Trosper said.

Engineers planned to do a health check on Spirit's flash memory on Tuesday, and then begin deleting hundreds of unneeded files to make the memory more manageable for Spirit's random-access memory, Trosper added.

"It's kind of like we have a patient in rehab and we are nursing her back to health," Trosper said.

Spirit could resume normal operations in two to three weeks, mission members said.

NASA sent Spirit to Gusev Crater, a broad depression believed to once have contained a lake. Opportunity was sent to Meridiani Planum, which scientists believe abounds in a mineral called gray hematite.

The iron-rich mineral typically forms in marine or volcanic environments marked by hydrothermal activity.

NASA launched two rovers to double its chances of successfully landing on Mars. Both carry identical plaques memorializing the seven astronauts who died aboard space shuttle Columbia nearly a year ago, Opportunity mission manager Jim Erickson said.

As of early Sunday, there were a record five spacecraft operating on or around Mars, including two NASA satellites and one from the European Space Agency orbiting the planet.

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On the Net:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov

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