PASADENA, Calif. -- Mother Nature here on the blue planet has put a crimp on red planet research. Scientists had hoped to operate a rock grinding tool onboard NASAs Spirit rover. That duty, however, has been upstaged by rain and lightning at a Deep Space Network radio dish in Canberra, Australia.

Scientists and engineers expect to pick up the choir of using the RAT to grind into a football-sized rock dubbed Adirondack in the next day or two.

Spirit is in no danger, using built-in smarts to put itself into sleep mode and maintain its systems, said the robots ground handlers here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

"Its not doing anything harmful," said Jennifer Trosper, JPL Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project at an early morning press briefing.

"Its possible well wait until we get all the data we need before we actually move onto the RAT activities. It is possible well RAT tomorrow. Its also possible that we would wait one more day to RAT, to make sure we understand all the things that executed and didnt execute on the spacecraft," Trosper said.

"We were planning to use the RAT today...but because of the uplink problems that didnt take place. So were going to try again tomorrow, thats all," Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the MER effort from Cornell University told SPACE.com .

The Mars science team had assumed that only two out of three days of Mars operations were going to work, Squyres said. "But weve been 17 for 18 days so farso one day it was rainy. This is a big nothing."

Spirit has already made an extensive study of Adirondack, taking detailed images of the object with a Microscopic Imager.

Meanwhile, a stunning image was released today, using multiple pictures to show Spirits left-behind landing pedestal sitting in the stark martian landscape that is Gusev Crater. That landing hardware is now called the Columbia Memorial Station in honor of the crew that was lost in shuttle Columbias reentry breakup nearly a year ago.

Scientists continue to make step-by-step progress in utilizing the talents of the robot field geologist on the surface of Mars.

Early findings from science instruments on the Spirit Mars rover have yielded a blend of old news and fresh outlooks about the physical makeup of Mars in evidence at the Gusev Crater landing site.

The international nature of Spirit operations was underscored by Squyres in a briefing held here yesterday.

Squyres said he likened Spirits array of science instruments to a Swiss Army Knife, "each having its own strength," he said.

Here at JPL, home of Spirit control, the preliminary results from two German-built instruments, an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and a Mssbauer spectrometer were discussed. Both devices analyzed the same patch of soil that was directly in front of the rover after Spirit drove off its lander January 15.

These same two pieces of science gear, as well as Spirits Microscopic Imager, have been busy again yielding new data on Adirondack.

Goestar Klingelhoefer, Payload Element Lead for the Mssbauer spectrometer from University Mainz in Germany, explained during the Tuesday briefing the preliminary results in using the instrument on Mars.

"This soil contains a mixture of minerals, and each mineral has its own distinctive Mssbauer pattern, like a fingerprint," Klingelhoefer noted.

In a surprise find, Klingelhoefer said the instrument identified olivine, a shiny green rock commonly found in lava on Earth. The other two have yet to be pinned down.

Scientists were somewhat perplexed by the discovery of olivine. Finding that material at Gusev Crater implies the soil consists at least partially of ground up rocks that have not been weathered or chemically altered.

That lack of weathering suggested by the presence of olivine might be evidence that the soil particles are finely ground volcanic material, Squyres said. Another possible explanation is that the soil layer where the measurements were taken is extremely thin, and the olivine is actually in rock hidden below the topside soil.

The Mssbauer spectrometer uses two pieces of radioactive cobalt-57, each about the size of pencil erasers, to determine with a high degree of accuracy the composition and abundance of iron-bearing minerals in martian rocks and soil.

Reporting on the APSX preliminary findings was Johannes Brueckner, Science Team Member of the Mars rover team from Germanys Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.

Brueckner reported that the instrument detected the presence of three different iron-bearing minerals in the soil at the rover's landing site within Gusev Crater.

As was found at the landing sites of past missions to Mars, iron and silicon make up the majority of the martian soil. Sulfur and chlorine were also observed as expected.

A new APXS finding was spotting trace elements, including zinc and nickel. These latter observations demonstrate the power of the device, Brueckner said, to pick up the signatures of elements too faint to be seen before.

The APXS uses alpha particles and X-rays to measure the presence and abundance of all major rock-forming elements except hydrogen.

Scientists are now deciding where to park Spirit for a stretch of time. That will give engineers and scientists time to ready themselves for the landing of Opportunity just a few days away.

"My guess is, if things go well, well drive Spirit to another location before stand down," JPLs Trosper told SPACE.com after yesterdays briefing. Spirits arm will be extended during that duration, using its science instruments to collect new data on a patch of select martian soil just a short drive away from Adirondack.

Spirit's twin Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, is nearing Mars. All is on track for the spacecraft to plunge through the atmosphere on Mars, touching down on January 24, at 9:05 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

Opportunity is heading for a landing on the opposite side of the planet from Spirits landing site at Gusev Crater.

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