SPACE.com -- Spirit Healthy, New Opportunity Photo Out

NEW PANORAMA: This 360-degree view of Opportunity's landing site was released Feb. 2.

A view of the Opportunity's landing platform, taken by the rover after it rolled onto Mars' surface. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

Opportunity's Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) detected the presence of grey hematite at the robot's Meridiani Planum landing site. This finding will help unlock the truth about Mars' past, specifically the role that water may have played in the area. The yellow line represents the spectrum, or light signature, of the martian soil, while the red line shows the spectrum of pure hematite. Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University

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	Spirit Healthy, New Opportunity Photo Out By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 03:05 pm ET 02 February 2004

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is healthy again, the result of recovery work by mission engineers since the robot develo

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is healthy again and restarting science-gathering duties at Gusev Crater.

On the other side of the planet, the Opportunity rover is set to begin soil experiments to characterize what elements and minerals are present at Meridiani Planum. A new picture released today shows a full 360-degree view of Opportunity's landing site.

For the first time in history, two fully operational rovers are on the surface of Mars, conducting science that's never been done before.

Spirits soulful sol

"Im extremely happy to tell you that today were doing science on Spirit just like we wereabout 10 sols ago," said Jennifer Trosper, mission manager for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) program. A sol is one martian day, equal to 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds on Earth.

"Spirit is back to the state she was in on sol 1," Trosper said at a Monday morning press briefing here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Part of the cure has been deleting files held in Spirits flash memory, Trosper said. Onboard software could not properly manage the flash memory, and that triggered Spirit's computer conniptions.

Cautionary note

"We are comfortable doing sciencebecause we understand the problem that got us into the anomaly well enough that we think we can avoid it," Trosper told SPACE.com. She did add a cautionary note, though. Software specialists dont know if there are side effects from the computer problems still lurking within Spirits software.

On Tuesday, Spirits entire flash memory is to be reformatted as another step in healing the robots built-in smarts.

Spirit operators are ready to resume detailed examinations of a volcanic rock nicknamed Adirondack later this week, then likely move onward to a lighter-colored rock by week's end.

"We are already strategizing how to drive far and fast with this rover," Trosper said. "It has been a great weekend on Spirit. We have two operational rovers on the surface of Mars."

Opportunity checkout

Since rolling off its lander early Saturday morning, Opportunity has undergone checkout, including a flexing of its robotic arm.

"Its the most complex mechanism on the rover," said Joe Melko, JPLs System Engineer for the MER Robotic Arm. The arm is working well, he said, with engineers successfully rotating the suite of instruments attached to mechanical appendage.

Melko said the robot's arm-mounted Microscopic Imager will inspect the soil tonight. Opportunitys Mössbauer spectrometer, designed to identify iron-containing minerals in soil and rock, is to be used tomorrow, he said.

Parallel parking

Opportunity is being readied for parallel parking, said Jeff Johnson, MER Science Team Member from the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Johnson said that scientists are now eager to wheel Opportunity along side a stretch of rock outcrop, just a short distance away from where the robot now sits within a small crater.

That outcrop of exposed rock is to be inspected up-close, making use of the robots Panoramic Camera and Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) a device that sees in infrared to determine mineral composition of objects.

By driving in parallel with the outcrop, Opportunity would gather an impressive amount of information the first on-site investigation of such a feature on another world.

"That would be an amazing data set," Johnson said.

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