[Space] NASA - Mars Exploration Rover MER-A "Spirit" - Update Thread

[kikki2]

Originariamente inviato da gpc
...
....ah no era la foto presa dal modello in laboratorio... (c'eravate cascati, eh? )

Ma non era questa la foto del modello in laboratorio ?

[gpc]

Preferivo il mostro marziano

[teogros]

Originariamente inviato da kikki2
Ma non era questa la foto del modello in laboratorio ?

:eheh:

[GioFX]

First rock, soil observations on tap for Spirit rover

The Spirit rover finally rolled onto the surface of Mars today and dutifully beamed back photos showing its now-abandoned lander resting atop crumpled airbags on the frigid martian soil. It was yet another moment for hugs and cheers in a mission that has proceeded from one emotional high to another since landing on Jan. 3.



"Less than 24 hours ago, President Bush committed our nation to a sustained human and robotic program of exploration," said Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "But we at NASA, we move awfully fast, in less than 15 hours, by doing our first step. Spirit is now ready to start its mission of exploration and discovery. We have six wheels in the dirt. Mars now is our sandbox and we are ready to play and learn. I have to tell you, I've never seen so many people so excited by just seeing two tracks in the dirt."

He was referring to the tread marks left in the martian soil behind Spirit's rear wheels.

"Last night ... I looked up in the sky and looked at Mars," Elachi said. "And I'm still awed that we have a rover on that planet. And I was thinking to myself that for centuries, there were millions of people who looked up the same way I looked up and were wondering what's up there.

"But we know what is up there. Just think about that. ... Think of the endless possibilities that this generation is going to leave as a legacy for generations of the future."

For mission manager Jennifer Trosper, who explained the roll off operation to Vice President Dick Cheney the day before, the moment called for a toast. At a 6 a.m. news conference attended by dozens of Spirit engineers and scientists, she pulled out a bottle of champagne and toasted "all the people who contributed to getting us to six wheels on Mars. Your efforts are historical. Thank you very much."

"You know how you write your to-do list for the day?" she asked. "My to-day list for (Wednesday and Thursday) was get some images from Mars, meet with the Vice President, then drive the rover onto Mars. I think as a young girl growing up on a farm in Ohio, I probably never envisioned that that might be my to-do list for today! But I am very honored and privileged to be part of this team that was able to do that."

The command ordering Spirit to roll off its lander was transmitted at 3:21:30 a.m. EST. Confirmation the rover had successfully negotiated its egress route and short drop to the surface came right at 5 a.m. as telemetry and then photographs showed Spirit's wheels in the dirt and the lander in the background (see earlier story for complete details).

"Is there life on Mars? The answer is absolutely yes. And we put it there today," said Joel Krajewski, chief engineer for impact and egress. "Thank you to this whole team for helping us do that."



For Kevin Burke, the engineer responsible for the rover's final egress onto the surface, the first grainy, black-and-white image confirming the successful maneuver was worth much more than a thousand words.

"I've gotta tell you, being the last person who has the last piece of hardware between sticking on the lander and being on the surface of Mars is very, very stressful," he said, prompting laughter from his colleagues. "I'm really glad, I'm really glad that we're done."

Flight director Chris Lewicki said the successful roll off opened a new chapter in Spirit's mission.

"So now it's the time where we kind of hand over the keys," he said. "We get to drive the nice sports car but in the end, we're just valets bringing it around the front and handing the keys over to the science team."

Spirit will remain where it is, close beside the no-longer-needed lander, for three to four days. Starting late tonight, engineers will begin putting the rover's robot arm through its paces, checking out its rock-eroding abrasion tool and taking the first microscope images of the rocky soil directly in front of the rover.

Late Friday, the arm's two spectrometers will make measurements and then, if all goes well, Spirit will begin moving again late Saturday or Sunday night.

Earlier today, principal Investigator Steve Squyres briefed the flight control team on the latest exploration strategy.

"We will do, I'm sure, magnificent things with this vehicle as time goes on, but we want the first drives, the first deployment of the IDD (instrument deployment device, or robot arm), the first-time activities to be clean, straight forward, as free of risk as they can be when you're operating a robot on Mars," he said.

"Ultimately, one of the things we want to do at this site is characterize the geological diversity. That means going and finding the unusual rocks, finding the unusual soils, finding the things that are not characteristic of the typical stuff around it. But before we can do that, we've got to understand the typical stuff.



"So the most important thing to do at the outset is to find characteristic, typical, kind of a baseline material and get a really good characterization of those things with the entire suite of instruments on the vehicle," he said. "I've likened this rover recently to a Swiss army knife, with all the different tools that it has on it. And you want to bring all those tools to bear on the key geologic materials."

Spirit also will participate in a first-of-a-kind joint project with the European Space Agency's recently arrived Mars Express orbiter.

"There's a remarkable event that's going to take place tomorrow where the Mars Express orbiter is going to go over our site and for the first time, we're going to be doing coordinated, international surface and orbit observations on the surface of another planet," Squyres said. "That's going to be really cool.

"Mars Express is going to be looking down with a very sophisticated suite of sensors at the very same time that we can look up and we can look at the terrain around us. So we'll be looking at the same patch of soil, looking through the same column of atmosphere at the same time Mars Express is going overhead. That's an opportunity not to be missed."

Looking ahead, Squyres reminded the flight control team that another rover, Opportunity, is scheduled to land on the other side of the planet at 12:05 a.m. EST on Jan. 25. To minimize the workload, Spirit will be parked over a scientifically interesting patch of soil for lengthy spectrometer measurements while the engineering community focuses on getting Opportunity safely down.

"Around the time that Opportunity lands, I don't need to tell this group that things are going to get pretty hot and heavy in here," Squyres said. "So to make it easier on everybody, for sols-22, 23 and 24, at this site, we're going to have a three-day stand down. By stand down, I don't mean we're not going to do any science activities. In fact, we're going to do a lot of science activity, But we wanted to plan three sols (martian days) that we could really plan in advance, script them ahead of time, get the whole thing ready to go ... and ease the burden on the team for that activity. That requires some significant advance thought and planning."



In an ideal world, he said, "we'd like to get a good, clean characterization of what the rocks look like without any dirt and a good, clean characterization of what the dirt looks like without any rocks. We can't do that here. We're going to end up in a little pebble field (with) all sorts of stuff mixed together. When we first put down an instrument like the APXS (Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer) on this patch, we're going to have rock and soil mixed together. It's going to be a deconvolution problem that we're not going to know how to solve until we've looked at the pure end members.

"But from the standpoint of checking out the IDD, checking out the instrument positioning system, it's a perfect place to do it. It's smooth, it's flat, there are plenty of features there for doing stereo ranging, you couldn't do any better."

And so for now, Spirit will remain right where it is. But by Saturday night or Sunday, it should be ready to roll.

"At that point, we start thinking about which rock to go to first," Squyres said. "Now we're starting to talk about the pure end members. We want to do rock first, followed by soil."

Three rocks directly in front of the rover have been identified as possible targets. Two of them, nicknamed Sushi and Sashimi, are located in a cluster or rocks known as the Wasabi region near Sleepy Hollow. The other rock, located to the left as viewed from Spirit, is known as Pyramid because of its sharply sculpted edges. Squyres said Pyramid is the leading candidate at present.

Once the initial rock observations are complete, Spirit will be positioned over undisturbed, fine-grain soil for the Opportunity stand down. A patch of pristine sand-like particles is present near Pyramid, as well as inside Sleepy Hollow.



Once that work is done, Spirit will drive up the lip of a nearby 660-foot-wide crater in hopes of finding rocks that were blasted out from below the surface. Such rocks may hold clues about whether or not the larger Gusev Crater landing site once held a vast lake.

"By going to lip of the crater, we will be able to sample material that has been thrown out," Squyres said. "There's a lot of talk on the science team about do we go down into the crater, do we not go down into the crater? Don't know, it depends on what we see when we get there, how daunting the terrain looks. We may find when we get in there it's mostly full of drift material. ... But by looking at the ejecta field, we expect to get a good handle on what materials have been excavated. Then, of course, we head for the hills."

He was referring to a cluster of hills two miles away that may be beyond Spirit's range. But scientists are eager to head that way because of the possibility the rover might find rocks that originated at higher levels.

"This is more than just 'get the scenery better,'" Squyres said. "There are several reasons to do this. One is, of course, the closer we get to it, the higher the resolution will be with our remote sensing instruments. Another is that there are a variety of materials ... that could shed off the hills and onto the flats around us. ... which may be a totally different material. And then of course, the image all of us want, is the view from part way up those hills looking back down onto the plains and where we came from."

[teogros]

Gio le ultime due immagini sono "disegni" vero?

[GioFX]

Originariamente inviato da teogros
Gio le ultime due immagini sono "disegni" vero?

Si, tranne l'ultima.

[GioFX]

Spirit robot rolls onto surface of Mars

WASHINGTON (AFP) Jan 15, 2004

The US robot probe Spirit on Thursday moved onto the surface of Mars for the first time to embark on its quest to find signs of water and past life on the Red Planet, NASA said.
The six wheeled probed rolled off its landing platform onto Martian soil for a brief -- 78 second -- but intricately prepared three meter (10-foot) excursion.

The manoeuvre had been delayed because of problems with the airbag that had cushioned the landing of Mars Expedition Rover vehicle on January 3.

But Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, triumphantly declared: "Spirit is now ready to start its mission of exploration and discovery."

Once off the platform, the robot only paused to realign its camera and transmission antenna before sending information, NASA officials said.

The first data confirming the success reached Earth an hour and 32 minutes after the order was given to start the drive. And six minutes after that, the first image of the landing vehicle taken by Spirit from the ground was at the mission headquarters. Champagne corks popped as the scientists waiting for word cheered.

"There was a great sigh of relief from me," said Kevin Burke, the lead mechanical engineer at Pasadena for the drive-off. "We are now on the surface of Mars."

The immediate objective is to analyze soil samples to detect the presence of water, which could determine if life once existed on Mars and provide future space missions a much needed source of fuel and oxygen.

NASA said that an international team of scientists at the laboratory would now decide how to examine the rocks, soil and atmosphere around Spirit.

"To our northeast, 250 meters (820 feet) to the northeast, is a crater 200 meters (655 feet) in diameter. This is an extremely attractive target," said mission scientist Steve Squyres, noting that it will "provide a window into the subsurface of Mars."

"The goal of this site is to try to find materials that will tell us whether or not Gusev crater once contained a lake and what the conditions were like in that lake," Squyres said.

Since landing on January 3, it has already beamed back colour images and other information about the terrain. NASA has been processing the images to make a high-resolution colour panorama from the most detailed images ever taken of the red planet.

The long-awaited spin on Martian soil came hours after US President George W. Bush announced that he wanted to send manned missions to the moon from 2015, and to Mars and beyond later.

The operation was conducted 12 days after the MER landed in the Gusev Crater.

Spirit's exit from the landing platform was delayed for three days because of problems with one of the airbags that cushioned the landing of the transport vehicle on Mars after a seven month journey from Earth.

NASA rotated Spirit 120 degrees to the right to stop it becoming entangled in the remains of the airbag.

A twin robotic probe, Opportunity, is set to land on another part of Mars on January 24.

Both are powered by solar energy and can move 40 meters (125 feet) each Martian day, more than during the entirety of NASA's 1997 Pathfinder mission, with its 10-kilogram (22-pound) mini-robot Sojourner.

Each robot will operate for three months on Mars.

On Friday, the European probe Mars Express will pass over Gusev crater, said Ray Arvidson, one of the US project scientists.

Mars Express may not be able to "see" Spirit, but the probe will take a series of measurements "looking down" that will prove helpful to the US mission, Arvidson said, praising the cooperative effort.

[GioFX]

1803 GMT (1:03 p.m. EST)

At the daily Spirit rover news conference underway at JPL, mission officials are reporting that the scientific arm was successfully used during the just-completed workday. Hovering over the soil in front of the rover, the arm's Microscopic Imager examined the surface. Also, the arm's Rock Abrasion Tool was checked out.




An image from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows its science arm deployed to examine the soil. Credit: NASA/JPL


1820 GMT (1:20 p.m. EST)

A new "overhead" view is created from Spirit photos to show the rover on the surface and the empty lander in the background.

[GioFX]

Spirit's robot arm extended for detailed study of soil

January 16, 2004

The Spirit Mars rover unlimbered its robot arm today and took the first microscopic images of another planet's surface. The smooth operation of the arm during the rover's 13th day on Mars was another major milestone in a mission that, so far, has sailed through activation and checkout without any significant problems.



Onboard camera view of the science arm after its deployment Friday. Credit: NASA/JPL

"Today, Spirit began its mission," said Mark Adler, the Mars Exploration Rover mission manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We had a good day. It was a lucky sol No. 13. About seven hours ago, we made our first use of the arm. We put the arm out in front of the rover, down hovering over the soil with the microscopic imager, and we took the first microscopic images of the surface of another planet."

As if that wasn't enough, Spirit made a series of observations in concert with a European satellite that arrived at Mars on Christmas day.

"We had the first coordinated international observations at Mars where the Spirit rover looked up and the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter looked down through the same atmosphere at the same time," Adler said. "We also had a checkout of our rock abrasion tool, and it checked out great."

Spirit rolled off its lander Thursday morning and parked about a foot away. Before the robot begins moving across the martian surface, scientists want to check out its instrument deployment device, or IDD - the rover's robot arm - and test the operation of its instruments. A rotating turret on the end of the arm carries two spectrometers, a microscopic imager and a rotating rock abrasion took, or RAT, that will be used later to burr into selected rocks, exposing pristine materials not affected by weathering.



Spirit's arm moves into action for soil studies. Credit: NASA/JPL

The instruments on the arm will "do some wonderful things by taking close-up images of the soil and also figuring out the chemistry and elemental composition of the rocks and soils within Gusev Crater," said Eric Baumgartner, lead robotic arm engineer at JPL.

"But best of all, this robotic arm sits on a rover. And as we've said, a rover is made to rove. And so the rover will take this arm and this tremendous science package along with it and every time we stop, we'll take a look at a rock or a piece of soil as we traverse across Gusev Crater. We have the ability to collect in situ science, science from the surface of Mars up close and personal and reach out an investigate that surface."

Baumgartner said he was happy to report that "the instrument deployment activities that went on today were very successful."

Ken Herkenhoff, science lead for the microscopic imager, said things went so smoothly "I'm a little tongue tied. It's hard for me to describe all the emotions I'm feeling right now. I'm elated and relieved at how well things are going. As I'll show you, we've got some nice images from our first day on Mars with the microscopic imager."

The microscope is capable of resolving features as small as a human hair or a grain of table salt. Test images taken earlier today were at "the highest resolution by far we've ever seen at Mars," he said.



This close-up look at a patch of martian soil by Spirit's microscopic imager is the sharpest image ever taken of another planet. Credit: NASA/JPL/US Geological Survey

Overnight Friday, the IDD's Mossbauer spectrometer will literally touch the soil in front of the rover for a four-hour test run. Then, Spirit's Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, or APXS, will be positioned a few millimeters above the soil for a planned 20-hour run.

Saturday night, the arm will be stowed for a 15-minute calibration of the APXS. Other IDD observations will be scheduled based on realtime planning while the rover's cameras continue the ongoing characterization of the landing site.

"We're going to have a big science weekend coming up, putting more instruments down on the soil," said project scientist Joy Crisp.

The Opportunity rover, meanwhile, continues to close in on Mars for a planned landing next Saturday night. On Friday, a trajectory correction maneuver was successfully carried out to precisely aim the spacecraft at a landing zone on the other side of Mars.

"Looks like we got a nice burn out of Opportunity," Jim Erickson, the mission manager said in a statement. "We're on target for our date on the plains of Meridiani next Saturday with a healthy spacecraft."

[GioFX]

MONDAY, JANUARY 19, 2004

Here is the latest dispatch from Mission Control:

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.

[GioFX]

TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2004

Spirit extended its arm today, reaching out and touching the rock called Adirondack.

The first activity was testing the "contact sensors" on the arm's RAT -- rock abrasion tool. The RAT could be used tomorrow to grind into the rock, but science team members are still debating whether to use the tool on this particular rock.

The arm was then used to snap microscopic images of the rock before switching to the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer instrument to study Adirondack's elemental composition. The APXS data collection will be completed shortly, allowing the Mossbauer Spectrometer to begin studying the rock overnight to look for iron-bearing minerals.

Officials report all continues to go well for Spirit and its exploration of the Gusev Crater.

[GioFX]

TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2004

Mars rover science team ponders soil mysteries

BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: January 20, 2004

In the first patch of soil examined in detail by instruments aboard the Mars Spirit rover, scientists were surprised to find olivine, a silicate mineral that typically forms in igneous rocks of volcanic origin. It also weathers rapidly in the presence of water, posing a mystery of sorts for the rover science team.


The yellow box in this high-resolution image from the panoramic camera on Spirit outlines the patch of soil scientists examined at Gusev Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

Spirit's landing site - Gusev Crater - is believed to have harbored a vast lake in the distant past and the major goal of the rover mission is to find out if water might have existed on the martian surface long enough for life to have evolved.

Olivine was discovered earlier, elsewhere on Mars, by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft currently in orbit around the red planet. The mineral quickly weathers to form clays and iron oxides and its presence could imply an absence of long-standing water in Gusev Crater.

Spirit principal investigator Steve Squyres said he has no doubt the 100-mile-wide crater held a lake at some point in the distant past. But the tortured history of the red planet has likely turned the crater floor into a complex mixture of rock and soil types that will take time to sort through.

"Mars is not going to give up secrets easily in this place," he told reporters today. "It's going to take a long time to puzzle through this. But the key is, we've got the tools to do it."

The discovery of olivine, he said, did two things: It provided an intriguing puzzle for geologists to ponder and served as welcome proof that Spirit's full complement of scientific instruments, including a sophisticated Mossbauer spectrometer supplied by Germany, is working properly.

"What is olivine? It's a mineral, it's a silicate mineral so it has silicon, oxygen, it has iron in it, it has magnesium in it," Squyres said. "It is the kind of mineral that one finds in igneous rocks, volcanic rocks, lava, basalt.

"Now it forms in a number of different kinds of rocks, but it is a primary igneous mineral for the most part, it's not something that you form as a result of lots of chemical weathering.

"Now there are a couple of different ways to interpret this," he said. "One possibility is that this martian soil, rather than being the result of a chemical weathering process, is simply very finely ground lava, very finely ground rock. That's one possibility, that would be a surprise to me.

"Some people on my team are so surprised to see the olivine in this measurement that they don't think we're looking at the soil. It's entirely possible that a millimeter down, two millimeters down beneath those grains is solid rock. Some people on my team believe we're seeing through that fluffy stuff ... so there may be rock solid rock beneath this stuff."

It is possible volcanic activity after the hypothesized lake vanished covered over earlier lakebed deposits. Even so, Squyres is optimistic about eventually finding such rocks.

"I believe it is unavoidable that somewhere beneath our wheels are lake sediments," he said. "How far down do we have to go to get to them? I don't know. There are a couple of possibilities. One of them is this stuff has been churned up so completely by impacts that whatever was present in the way of sedimentary layering is long gone and what we're seeing at the surface is some mixture of maybe volcanic materials, windblown materials, stuff that's been churned up by the impact process. So that's one possibility.

"Another possibility is that what we're sitting on is just stuff that's been blown in by the wind, and volcanic (activity) and so forth and that the lake sediments are, in fact, buried. As I said, it's beneath our wheels somewhere, but I don't know how far down."

Luckily, a 650-foot-wide crater is within reach of Spirit, a mere 820 feet or so away from its current position. The impact that created a crater that wide could have blasted out material from as much as 150 feet below the current surface.

"As we get close to that crater and we start to see the ejecta, the stuff that was thrown out of it, we're going to be getting deeper and deeper into materials that came from far beneath our wheels," Squyres said. "I don't think there's any question, as I said, that there was once a lake at Gusev Crater. But I also said Mars is not going to give up her secrets very easily. And finding those materials is going to take the full capabilities this vehicle has to offer."

Spirit rolled off its lander and onto the floor of Gusev Crater late last week. Its first scientific target was a small patch of fine-grain soil just a few feet from the lander. The rover's instrument deployment device, or IDD - a robot arm by any other name - pointed a microscope at the soil and then two spectrometers, the Mossbauer and the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, also provided by Germany. The former is designed to detect iron-bearing minerals while the latter sniffs out rock-forming elements.

The Mossbauer detected olivine and two different forms of iron while the APXS detected high concentrations of silicon and iron, along with calcium, sulfur, chlorine and nickel.

On Sunday, Spirit was ordered to drive about 9.4 feet to a football-size rock nicknamed "Adirondack" and that's where the rover remained today. The rock has been photographed by the rover's microscope and spectrometer runs will be carried out overnight.


This true color image taken by the panoramic camera onboard the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows "Adirondack," the rover's first target rock. Scientists named the angular rock after the Adirondack mountain range in New York. The word Adirondack is Native American and is interpreted by some to mean "They of the great rocks." Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

The only instrument, or tool, aboard Spirit that has not yet been put to work is its rock abrasion tool, or "RAT," which uses a spinning rotor to bore into selected rocks to reach pristine, non-weathered material. Scientists are debating whether to use the RAT on Adirondack overnight Tuesday.

"We're starting to put together a picture of what the soil at this particular place in Gusev Crater is like," Squyres said. "There are some puzzles, there are some surprises, we have much that we still have to learn, but we're starting to put together an interesting story."

[gegeg]

Non ci capisco na' mazza non e' che qualche anima pia mi spiega cos'e' quella pietra a forma di piramide

[GioFX]

Spirit's latest images from Mars



This image mosaic taken by the panoramic camera onboard the Spirit rover shows the rover's landing site, the Columbia Memorial Station, at Gusev Crater, Mars. This spectacular view may encapsulate Spirit's entire journey, from lander to its possible final destination toward the east hills. On its way, the rover will travel 250 meters (820 feet) northeast to a large crater approximately 200 meters (660 feet) across, the ridge of which can be seen to the left of this image. To the right are the east hills, about 3 kilometers (2 miles) away from the lander. The picture was taken on the 16th martian day, or sol, of the mission (Jan. 18/19, 2004). A portion of Spirit's solar panels appear in the foreground. Data from the panoramic camera's green, blue and infrared filters were combined to create this approximate true color image. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

[GioFX]

Originariamente inviato da gegeg
Non ci capisco na' mazza non e' che qualche anima pia mi spiega cos'e' quella pietra a forma di piramide

Si tratta della primo target indivituato dallo Science Team della missione MER presso il Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Si tratta di una roccia di origine vulcanica, soprannominata dagli scienziati Adirondack, come una celebre catena montuosa nello stato di New York.

[GioFX]

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2004

Thunderstorms in Australia have created a slow workday on Mars.

The rainy weather at the Deep Space Network communications station in Canberra hampered the transmission of commands from Earth to the Spirit rover today.

"This is something that is kind of typical of spacecraft operations where there are days when it rains and things don't quite go the way you expect," mission manager Jennifer Trosper said. "So not a lot of science was done today, but the rover is in a very safe state. It's healthy."

The Rock Abrasion Tool grinding of "Adirondack" has been pushed back until at least tomorrow.

"When the rover woke up this morning we were actually over the Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia, because that was the part of Earth pointed at Mars at the time. There was lightning and there was rain and there was a thunderstorm in Canberra," Trosper told reporters at today's Spirit news conference.

"In the morning time frame -- Local Solar Time -- at the Gusev site between about 9 and 9:45 a.m. is an important time frame for us to take all of the work we did overnight, all the of sequences we built, the commands for the rover and send those. We transmit them to the rover. And then (Spirit) will start to act on those at about 9:45 Local Solar Time.

"As a result of the rain in Canberra today, the signal strengths were not able to be received by the rover. So we weren't able to transmit those commands to the rover. It received a weak signal from Earth because of the rain, so it actually didn't get all of data we wanted it to get. As a result, the rover did exactly what it was supposed to do and it continued to run yesterday's master sequence, which takes care of the rover in terms of keeping it awake during the day and continues to do communications."

A UHF communications session with the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft was expected early this afternoon (Eastern Time).

"Depending on what we see in the UHF pass, it is possible we will wait to get all the data we need before we actually move on with the RAT'ing activities," Trosper said. "It is possible that we would RAT tomorrow, it is also possible that we would wait one more day to RAT to make sure we understand all of the things that executed and didn't execute on the spacecraft."

[GioFX]

THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2004

Spirit mission controllers did not receive expected data from the Mars Exploration Rover during scheduled communication passes on Wednesday, NASA announced a short while ago.

"Ground controllers were able to send commands to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit early Wednesday and received a simple signal acknowledging that the rover heard them, but they did not receive expected scientific and engineering data during scheduled communication passes during the rest of that martian day," the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement.

"Project managers have not yet determined the cause, but similar events occurred several times during the Mars Pathfinder mission. The team is examining a number of different scenarios, some of which would be resolved when the rover wakes up after powering down at the end of the martian day (around midday Pacific time Wednesday).

"The next opportunity to hear from the vehicle is when the rover may attempt to communicate with the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter at about 8:30 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday night (11:30 p.m. EST; 0430 GMT). A second communication opportunity may occur about two hours later during a relay pass via the Mars Odyssey orbiter. If necessary, the flight team will take additional recovery steps early Thursday morning (the morning of sol 19 on Mars) when the rover wakes up and can communicate directly with Earth."

NASA says the next update on the rover's status will be announced at the daily news conference scheduled for Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific time (12 p.m. EST; 1700 GMT).

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THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2004

The Mars Spirit rover stopped beaming scientific data to flight controllers Wednesday following thunderstorms at an Australian ground station that may have interfered with the daily uplink of critical computer commands.

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Spirit controllers dealing with communications issues

BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: January 22, 2004 @ 1:40 a.m. EST

The Mars Spirit rover stopped beaming scientific data to flight controllers Wednesday following thunderstorms at an Australian ground station that may have interfered with the daily uplink of critical computer commands.

The rover acknowledged receiving its daily instructions, but during a subsequent overflight of the Mars Odyssey orbiter, Spirit did not transmit science data as expected. Another relay opportunity, this one with the Mars Global Surveyor, began around 11:30 p.m. EST but as of 12:30 a.m., a spokesman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said he had been unable to reach flight controllers to confirm whether any data were received.

"Ground controllers were able to send commands to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit early Wednesday and received a simple signal acknowledging that the rover heard them, but they did not receive expected scientific and engineering data during scheduled communication passes during the rest of that martian day," said a status report from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"Project managers have not yet determined the cause, but similar events occurred several times during the Mars Pathfinder mission. The team is examining a number of different scenarios, some of which would be resolved when the rover wakes up after powering down at the end of the martian day (around midday Pacific time Wednesday)."

It is possible the glitch has, in fact, been resolved. But JPL's public affairs office is not set up to provide overnight updates from mission control.

During a news briefing Wednesday afternoon, mission manager Jennifer Trosper said the daily transmission of commands to Spirit was affected by thunderstorms at the Deep Space Network's ground station in Canberra, Australia. Whether that had anything to do with subsequent events was not addressed in the JPL status report.

"You've heard about the rain in Spain and how that can cause problems? Well, today it was the rain in Canberra," Trosper said. "When the rover woke up this morning, we were actually over the Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia, because that was the part of the Earth that was pointed toward Mars at the time. There was lightning and there was rain and there was a thunderstorm in Canberra.

"The morning timeframe, local solar time at the Gusev [Crater landing] site, between about 9 a.m. and 9:45 a.m., is an important time for us to take all of the work we did overnight, all of the sequences we built, the commands to the rover, we transmit them to the rover and then it will start to act on those about 9:45 local solar time.

"As a result of the rain in Canberra today, the signal strength was not able to be received by the rover and so we weren't able to transmit those commands to the rover. It received a weak signal from Earth because of the rain and so, it actually didn't get all the data we wanted it to get. As a result, the rover did exactly what it was supposed to do, it continued to run yesterday's master sequence, which takes care of the rover in terms of keeping it awake during the day and continues to do communications."

Trosper said she expected to hear from Spirit during an afternoon overflight of the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. But no data were received then, or presumably later, during an evening pass by the Mars Global Surveyor. Another opportunity was available around 1:30 a.m. EST Thursday.

"If necessary, the flight team will take additional recovery steps early Thursday morning (the morning of sol 19 on Mars) when the rover wakes up and can communicate directly with Earth," the status report said.

The next Spirit news conference is planned for noon EST Thursday.

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'Serious Anomaly' Silences Mars Spirit Rover

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 12:40 pm ET
21 January 2004

PASADENA, Calif. -- Mars Rover officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Thursday that "a serious anomaly" occurred onboard the robot Spirit Wednesday stopping the transmission of direct data for almost 24 hours.

Peter Theisinger, Mars Exploration Rover project manager, began Thursday's press conference by telling reporters that they had not received contact from Spirit, either through relays from the Mars Global Surveyor or the Mars Odyssey spacecraft now orbiting the red planet.

However, Jennifer Trosper, mission manager of Surface Operations, interrupted the press briefing to announch that a signal had been recieved from the rover via its direct link to Earth. That said, no direct data had yet to be received from the robotic geologist.

Theisinger explained that the situation remains serious and that "no one single fault ... that we can conceive of" can explain this anamoly.

A communiqué released late afternoon Wednesday from JPL indicated an unresolved issue with the status of the Spirit Mars rover.

According to the statement, ground controllers were able to send commands to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit early Wednesday and received a simple signal acknowledging that the rover heard them.

However, ground controllers here did not receive expected scientific and engineering data from Spirit during scheduled communication passes during the rest of that martian day.