NASA Rovers Reach Mars Milestone
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Mars rover Opportunity is imaging its sandy surroundings. Ground controllers want to understand why the robot got stuck in sand dune. CREDIT: NASA/JPL. |
A
milestone has been reached for those hard-at-work red planet rovers, Spirit and
Opportunity. Late last week, ground
controllers hit 1,000 sols of working with the robots on the surface of Mars. A
sol is duration
of a solar day on that faraway planet.
On June 9, Opportunity
hit 490 sols and Spirit attained 510 sols since their independent landings in
January 2004.
Reaching 1,000 sols "is
a remarkable accomplishment," said Steve Squyres,
lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project at Cornell
University in Ithaca,
New York. He tipped his hat to
friends, colleagues and comrades, engineer and scientist alike, on the MER
uplink team.
In his Cornell-based web
site on the Mars rovers, Squyres noted that the
Earth-to-Mars uplink process - controlling the robots across interplanetary
space - "is intense, engrossing and exhausting."
Escape from "Purgatory Dune"
"Good
things are happening on both sides of the planet," Squyres
said, in terms of robot operations.
At
Meridiani Planum, the
Opportunity Mars rover is now free of a sand dune that halted its movement for
five weeks. "At Meridiani, we'll soon begin our first
maneuvers to reorient the rover so that we can study the feature that got
us...and then be on our way again," Squyres said.
The
menacing feature that trapped Opportunity now
has a name: "Purgatory Dune".
"We
weren't calling it anything back when we were stuck in it, but now that we're
out, it seemed there ought to be a name for the thing," Squyres
explained.
Are there any best guesses of why that particular dune snagged the rover, and are other sand traps lurking in the area? "No guesses," Squyres told SPACE.com. "We're going to collect data and then think hard about it...not try to guess."
What information would imagery of Purgatory Dune provide rover ground controllers and scientists? There's need to look at grain size, detailed topography, whether or not the dune has a crust - and if it does have a crust, what that crust is made of, Squyres said. "Basically, everything we can safely learn about it that might be of some help in the future."
Spirited spiral: up and to the right
On
the other side of Mars from where Opportunity
rests, the Spirit rover is doing survey work within the Columbia Hills at Gusev Crater.
Spirit
is scoping out which way rocks there are tilted. There are very interesting
outcrops in an area dubbed "Tennessee
Valley", and some "really
good-looking stuff" on the far wall of the valley, Squyres
said.
The
Spirit rover team has decided to head up on a section tagged as "Husband Hill".
"We're
not going to try a frontal assault this time. Instead, we're going to spiral up
and to the right, working both upslope and also cross-slope simultaneously.
Whether we'll actually reach the summit is an open question at this point. But
we're convinced that the route we've chosen offers the quickest path to a view
of whatever's on the south side of the hill... and that's what we want to see
next," Squyres concluded.
- Red Planet Rovers: Complete Coverage
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