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ZL2VAL > SPIRIT 20.01.04 12:33l 95 Lines 4153 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 650416ZL2VAL
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Subj: Spirit takes a short stroll
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Sent: 040120/0946Z @:ZL2AB.#46.NZL.OC #:33689 [New Plymouth] FBB7.00g
From: ZL2VAL@ZL2AB.#46.NZL.OC
To : SPIRIT@WW
NEWS RELEASE: 2004-024
January 19, 2004
Spirit Drives to a Rock Called "Adirondack" for Close Inspection
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 Mossbauer 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.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space
Science, Washington, D.C. Images and additional information about the
project are available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and
from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., at http://athena.cornell.edu
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73 de Alan, (Sysop ZL2AB).
AX25:ZL2VAL@ZL2AB.#46.NZL.OC
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Message timed: 22:33 on 2004-Jan-20 (NZ local)
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