[meteorite-list] First Rock, Soil Observations On Tap For Spirit Rover

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:32:02 2004
Message-ID: <200401160131.RAA01690_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040115onthesurface.html

First rock, soil observations on tap for Spirit rover
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
January 15, 2004

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."
Received on Thu 15 Jan 2004 08:31:55 PM PST