Spirit Rover Took its First Drive on Mars
Jet Propulsion Lab — NASA’s Spirit rover has successfully driven to its first target on Mars, a football-sized rock that scientists have dubbed Adirondack.
The Mars Exploration Rover flight team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., plans to send commands to Spirit early Tuesday to examine Adirondack with a microscope and two instruments that reveal the composition of rocks, said JPL’s Dr. Mark Adler, Spirit mission manager.
The instruments are the Mössbauer spectrometer and the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer.
Spirit successfully rolled off the lander and onto the martian surface last Thursday. To make the drive to Adirondack, the rover turned 40 degrees in short arcs totaling 95 centimeters (3.1 feet). It then turned in place to face the target rock and drove four short moves straightforward totaling 1.9 meters (6.2 feet).
The moves covered a span of 30 minutes on Sunday, though most of that was sitting still and taking pictures between moves. The total amount of time when Spirit was actually moving was about two minutes.
“These are the sorts of baby steps we’re taking,” said JPL’s Dr. Eddie Tunstel, rover mobility engineer.
“The drive was designed for two purposes, one of which was to get to the rock,” Tunstel said. “From the mobility engineers’ standpoint, this drive was geared to testing out how we do drives on this new surface.”
Gathering new information such as how much the wheels slip in the martian soil will give the team confidence for more ambitious drives in future weeks and months.
“Adirondack is now about one foot (30 centimeters) in front of the front wheels,” he said.
Scientists chose Adirondack to be Spirit’s first target rock rather than another rock, called Sashimi, that would have been a shorter, straight-ahead drive.
Rocks are time capsules containing evidence of the environmental conditions of the past, said Dr. Dave Des Marais, a rover science-team member from NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “We needed to decide which of these time capsules to open.”
Sashimi appears dustier than Adirondack. The dust layer could obscure good observations of the rock’s surface, which may give information about chemical changes and other weathering from environmental conditions affecting the rock since its surface was fresh.
Also, Sashimi is more pitted than Adirondack. That makes it a poorer candidate for the rover’s rock abrasion tool, which scrapes away a rock’s surface for a view of the interior evidence about environmental conditions when the rock first formed.
Adirondack has a “nice, flat surface” well suited to trying out the rover’s tools on their first martian rock, Des Marais said.
“The hypothesis is that this is a volcanic rock, but we’ll test that hypothesis,” 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.
Spirit’s twin Mars Exploration Rover, 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.
About the Mars Exploration Rover Mission
NASA’s twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers, launched toward Mars on June 10 and July 7, 2003, in search of answers about the history of water on Mars. Spirit landed on January 3, and Opportunity is scheduled to land on January 24, 2004.
The Mars Exploration Rover mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet.
Primary among the mission’s scientific goals is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The spacecraft are targeted to sites on opposite sides of Mars that appear to have been affected by liquid water in the past.
The landing sites are at Gusev Crater, a possible former lake in a giant impact crater, and Meridiani Planum, where mineral deposits (hematite) suggest Mars had a wet past.
After the airbag-protected landing craft settle onto the surface and open, the rovers will roll out to take panoramic images.
These will give scientists the information they need to select promising geological targets that will tell part of the story of water in Mars’ past. Then, the rovers will drive to those locations to perform on-site scientific investigations over the course of their 90-day mission.
These are the primary science instruments to be carried by the rovers:
– Panoramic Camera (Pancam): for determining the mineralogy, texture, and structure of the local terrain.
– Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES): for identifying promising rocks and soils for closer examination and for determining the processes that formed Martian rocks. The instrument will also look skyward to provide temperature profiles of the Martian atmosphere.
– Mössbauer Spectrometer (MB): for close-up investigations of the mineralogy of iron-bearing rocks and soils.
– Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS): for close-up analysis of the abundances of elements that make up rocks and soils.
– Magnets: for collecting magnetic dust particles. The Mössbauer Spectrometer and the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer will analyze the particles collected and help determine the ratio of magnetic particles to non-magnetic particles. They will also analyze the composition of magnetic minerals in airborne dust and rocks that have been ground by the Rock Abrasion Tool.
– Microscopic Imager (MI): for obtaining close-up, high-resolution images of rocks and soils.
– Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT): for removing dusty and weathered rock surfaces and exposing fresh material for examination by instruments onboard.
A goal for the rover is to drive up to 40 meters (about 44 yards) in a single day, for a total of up to one 1 kilometer (about three-quarters of a mile).
Moving from place to place, the rovers will perform on-site geological investigations. Each rover is sort of the mechanical equivalent of a geologist walking the surface of Mars. The mast-mounted cameras are mounted 1.5 meters(5 feet) high and will provide 360-degree, stereoscopic, humanlike views of the terrain.
The robotic arm will be capable of movement in much the same way as a human arm with an elbow and wrist, and will place instruments directly up against rock and soil targets of interest.
In the mechanical “fist” of the arm is a microscopic camera that will serve the same purpose as a geologist’s handheld magnifying lens. The Rock Abrasion Tool serves the purpose of a geologist’s rock hammer to expose the insides of rocks.
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