The researchers and robots entrenched in NASA's current Mars exploration mission snatched a few days rest this week during a multi-day software upload to the red planet rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
The three-day lull in science investigations allowed researchers time to catch up on the avalanche of data sent home by the robotic geologists, and gave the rovers themselves a chance to conduct a bit of data spring cleaning.
"During the sols that we used for the software upload, we did pretty well stand down on the science data gathering," said Jan Chodas, flight software manager for the rover mission, during a briefing Wednesday at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "We had allocated four sols to the process and the rovers completed the upload in three."
Martian days are measured in sols, which at 24 hours and 37 minutes are slightly longer than Earth days.
The new software is designed to upgrade the autonomous driving abilities of Spirit and Opportunity, and contain instructions to put both rovers into a deep sleep each night to conserve power. Some files were also intended to prevent new computer glitches like that which plagued Spirit early on in its mission.
A short reprieve
While the rovers received their new computer files, Mars Exploration Rover (MER) researchers were able to comb through data collected by Opportunity on "Bounce Rock," one of the few rocks found on the plains of its Meridiani Planum landing site.
"It's very different from anything we see from orbit," said Deanne Rogers, a science team collaborator for the rover mission, of "Bounce Rock."
Based on the ratio of magnesium and iron detected in "Bounce Rock," the object appears to have more in common with Earth rocks, specifically meteorites thought to originate from Mars, than the local geology around Meridiani.
MER science team member Benton Clark said "Bounce Rock" is very similar to a meteorite called 79001-B, which was pulled out of the ground in Antarctica in 1979. The rock also has similarities to another meteorite, named Shergotty, found in India in 1865.
"We did believe for some time that [79001-B] originated on Mars," Clark said. "And there's roughly 20 meteorites here thought to come from Mars."
MER researchers said that it's possible that "Bounce Rock" is ejecta material from an impact crater about 31 miles (50 kilometers) south of Opportunity's location. Whether that distant crater could also be the source of Martian meteorites found on Earth, however, is uncertain, they added.
Cleaning house
During the flight software upload, both Spirit and Opportunity remained motionless with their robot arms positioned to point Moessbauer spectrometers down into the soil and alpha particle X-ray spectrometers up at the sky. Those instruments were able to make some observations during the three-day software upload as power supplies permitted.
Chodas said that during the upload, scientists were able to download some 700 megabits of data stored in the flash memory. That's about two-thirds of the available flash memory storage space or both Spirit and Opportunity, a clean sweep for researchers hoping to conduct science studies will into September.
Among that massive data download was the final bits of the Lion King panorama, a huge composite of images taken by Opportunity as it left Eagle Crater. The mosaic is made up of 600 images stitched together to include the crater's outcrop, Opportunity's lander and the tracks left as it rolled out onto the plains.
Chodas said the new flight software is working flawlessly, and researchers hope to put it to the test in Spirit's next autonomous drive toward the Columbia Hills.
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