Storm Delays Spirit Rover’s Work on Mars
By ROBERT JABLON
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Rain in Australia could continue to delay signals that instruct the Spirit rover to drill into a Mars rock, a milestone for NASA missions on the Red Planet.
The six-wheeled robot on Thursday or Friday is to grind away a tiny area of the weathered face of a sharply angled rock dubbed Adirondack. Examination of the rock beneath could offer clues to Mars’ geologic past.
But on Wednesday, NASA scientists said a thunderstorm near a Deep Space Network antenna in Canberra, Australia disrupted controllers’ efforts to initiate the drilling.
“We weren’t able to transmit those commands to the rover,” said mission manager Jennifer Trosper at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Instead, Spirit continued to use a day-old master sequence of commands that kept it awake and communicating but not moving or using its instrument-tipped robotic arm.
Later in the day, several batches of scientific and engineering data expected from the rover were not received. Mission officials didn’t specify the reason but noted similar glitches occurred several times during the 1997 Pathfinder mission.
On another issue, mission members said they’re working to determine whether the Red Planet is actually red.
The bright red dust, rusty rocks and salmon sky seen in the rover’s panorama shots are approximations. Some shots were taken using parts of the spectrum unseen by the human eye but useful in helping determine the chemical makeup of rocks.
The shots were color-balanced to approximate what a person might see standing on the martian surface, but it may be weeks before scientists perform the calculations to show true color, said Ray Arvidson of Washington University, the project’s deputy main scientist.
Mars was seen in a different shade in photos taken by the Viking landers in 1976, he said.
“Medium chocolate brown is the color that we saw, which is kind of a red, so it’s good enough for the Red Planet,” Arvidson said.
Spirit landed on Mars Jan. 3 for a three-month mission to search Gusev Crater, a rock-strewn stretch of dusty, streaked soil that scientists believe may be the bed of an ancient lake. If Mars once had surface water, it had the potential to support life.
Spirit’s twin, Opportunity, is scheduled to land on Mars on Saturday.
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