NASA to release 'significant findings' from Mars rover mission
Posted on: Monday, 1 March 2004, 06:00 CST
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- NASA plans to announce what it terms ``significant findings'' by its Mars rover Opportunity, which has been studying rocks and soil in a martian crater for geologic evidence that the Red Planet was once a wetter place that could have been hospitable to life.
The findings were to be released Tuesday during a press conference at National Aeronautics and Space Administration headquarters in Washington, D.C., NASA said Monday.
The space agency revealed no details in advance, although participants in the twin rover mission managed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said last week that scientists were excited by data that the Opportunity rover was sending back to Earth.
Opportunity has been studying an outcropping of layered rock close to its landing site in a small crater on an area of Mars called Meridiani Planum.
The six-wheel robot has been using microscopic photography, a rock abrasion tool that grinds off surface layers and spectrometers to determine the composition of the outcropping, particularly a piece dubbed ``El Capitan.''
Rob Manning, a mission manager at JPL, said a week ago that he couldn't comment on the science team's speculation about the findings but that there was ``probably as much enthusiasm as we've ever had by the science team and a lot of intense discussions over these last several days.''
On Thursday, the mission's deputy principal investigator, Ray Arvidson, acknowledged that some of the working hypotheses involved water, but he cautioned that was not the case in all hypotheses.
He also expressed confidence that the rover mission was returning the kind of data scientists need to answer the mission's fundamental question. But he also characterized the science as ``work in progress.''
While Opportunity has stayed close to its landing site to explore the outcropping, its twin, Spirit, has been traveling on the other side of the planet, studying rocks and soil on its way to a big crater named ``Bonneville'' that scientists hope will give the rover a view of geology well below the surface.
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov
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