We have two operational rovers on Mars,” mission manager Jennifer Trosper told a Monday news conference at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, kicked off what NASA hoped would be the start of sustained science operations with in-depth analyses of the soils and rocks on the ground beneath their wheels.
For Spirit, the cure involved deleting thousands of files from the rover’s flash memory. Many of the deleted files were left over from the seven- month flight from Florida to Mars. Onboard software was having difficulty managing the flash memory, triggering Spirit’s computer to reset itself about once an hour.
Two days after the problem arose, engineers began using a temporary workaround of sending commands every day to put Spirit into an operations mode that avoided use of flash memory. Now, however, the computer is stable even when operating in the normal mode, which uses the flash memory.
Opportunity also stretched out its robotic arm and photographed in detail each of the four instruments it carries. The arm is the most complex mechanism on each rover. “The arm is working well,” engineer Joe Melko said.
NASA planned for Opportunity to take microscopic images of the rusty soil and then put its Mossbauer spectrometer to the ground. The German-built instrument measures the composition and abundance of iron-bearing minerals.
Spirit resumed its own scientific observations, and NASA planned for it to brush off the surface of a volcanic rock called Adirondack (above), removing any dust and allowing the rover’s microscopic imager to photograph it. Opportunity already has discovered an iron-rich mineral called gray hematite. Preliminary measurements suggest the mineral is of a variety that forms in liquid water. Spirit may have to drive hundreds of yards, to a nearby crater called Bonneville, to uncover similar geologic proof.
“Spirit is the driving mission. We are already theorizing how to drive far and fast,” Trosper said.
Google and Astrobiology have the latest. Dailywireless has more on Spirit Telecommunications, Beagle 2 systems, Spirit In Dirt, Good News from Mars, and Telepresence Now!.
Additional web resources include Mars Rover Images, Mars Today, Space.com, Spaceflight Now, The Planetary Society, Discovery, The BBC, Nasa homepage, Welcome to the Nasa Web, Nasa Watch (not a Nasa site), Houston Space Chronicle, Encyclopedia Astronautica, Nasa Human Spaceflight (shuttle homepage), Kennedy Space Center, Mars Global Surveyor, Galileo: journey to Jupiter, European Space Agency, United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, British National Space Centre, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and Space Ref have the latest. Daily Wireless has more on The Beagle 2, The Mission to Mars and the 1999 Mission to Mars.
