[meteorite-list] Rover Has Landed In Scientific 'Sweet Spot'

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:31:58 2004
Message-ID: <200401050725.XAA20206_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040104site.html

Rover has landed in scientific 'sweet spot'
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
January 4, 2004

The Spirit Mars rover, currently asleep on the frigid surface of Mars, landed just
six miles downrange from NASA's original target, a virtual bull's-eye that put
the rover in the heart of a region scoured by scores of swirling dust devils.

Scientists are in the process of pinpointing Spirit's exact location, but they
already know where it is with fairly high accuracy by comparing broad-area
pictures taken by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and images from a
downward-pointing camera aboard the lander that were snapped during final
descent.

Gusev Crater once harbored a vast lake, scientists believe. The goal of the
rover mission is to determine how long water might have persisted on the
surface and whether life might have had time to evolve. The Odyssey image
shows Spirit landed in a region of Gusev that is crisscrossed with dark tracks
left by the passage of windy dust devils, blowing fine-grained soil away and
exposing denser material below. Scientists are hopeful the martian winds have
exposed rocks formed or deposited when water still filled the Gusev basin.

"I told you last night we hit the sweet spot," Steve Squyres, the Spirit principal
investigator, told reporters during a noon press conference. "What we wanted
was some place where the wind, where mother nature, has cleaned off the rocks
for us so we don't have to be totally occupied with doing that ourselves.

"And what you're seeing there, those marvelous snake-like features all over
the ground, those are dust devil tracks. We know that there are dust devils on
Mars and they sort of look like little tornados, but they're considerably less
violent than that. But they're good at swirling dust up off the surface and
cleaning off rocks and we've landed right in a place that's so thick with dust
devil tracks that a lot of the dust has been blown away."

Because the atmospheric pressure on the martian surface is so low - one
one-hundredth that of sea level on Earth - the dust devils pose no threat to the
400-pound Spirit. But they are interesting in their own right, and Squyres said
engineers already are talking about taking repeated snapshots at some point
down the road in a bid to catch one in action.

"Wouldn't that be cool? To catch one of these things in the act, you know, kind
of moving around?" Squyres said. "The dust devils have done us a favor by
cleaning off the rocks for us and I'd like to catch one in the act."

In the meantime, he said, "we now know with great certainty that we are in the
place where we absolutely wanted to be in Gusev Crater. There's a certain
amount of luck involved in such things, but my hat is off to the navigators
because they just did a fantastic job of just greasing us in right where we
wanted to be. ... We're in a marvelous place."
Received on Mon 05 Jan 2004 02:25:57 AM PST