Posted on 01/15/2004 7:30:47 AM PST by blam
Spirit has 'brief outing' on Martian surface
January 15 2004 at 12:39PM
By Reuters
By Steve Gorman
Pasadena - Nasa scientists sent the robotic rover Spirit out for its first spin on Martian soil on Thursday, commanding the six-wheeled vehicle to roll off its landing platform 12 days after it arrived on the Red Planet.
Radio signals instructing Spirit to make its initial excursion were beamed to Mars at 8.30am and confirmation that the rover had ventured onto the planet's surface came with a return transmission about an hour and 40 minutes afterward.
Moments later, mission controllers received the first pictures taken by rover looking back at the lander, showing tracks left by Spirit in the martian soil.
'Its initial excursion were beamed to Mars at 12.21am' The brief outing took Spirit only about three metres straight ahead but was cheered by project managers at the Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a successful prelude to Spirit's mobile search for signs of life-sustaining water.
"We are definitely on the surface of Mars," declared Rob Manning, one of Nasa's project managers. "Being on the soil marks a major turning point for the project."
For at least the next 78 days, the golf cart-sized explorer is to roam its surroundings in Gusev Crater, a barren, wind-swept basin about the size of Connecticut that scientists believe may have been the site of an ancient lake bed once fed by a long, deep martian river.
Spirit has already sent back stunning, three-dimensional, colour photographs of Mars revealing the planet's terrain in vivid, unprecedented detail. The JPL team is even more eager to closely examine soil and rocks using a collection of high-tech geologic gadgets carried on the rover's robot arm.
Spirit's first jaunt away from the landing pod in which it bounced to the martian surface on January 3 comes as Nasa looks forward to a new era of manned space exploration called for on Wednesday by President George Bush, including the eventual goal of sending astronauts to the Red Planet.
'We are definitely on the surface of Mars' Spirit is the fourth probe ever to successfully land on Mars, following in the footsteps of two Viking landers in the 1970s and the Pathfinder mission in 1997.
On January 24, Spirit's twin rover, named Opportunity, is scheduled to land on the opposite side of the planet for its own three-month mission.
Later on Thursday, JPL controllers plan to aim an instrument called a mini-thermal emission spectrometer, or mini-TES, upward to obtain a reading of infrared radiation emitted by particles in the martian sky at the time the European obiter Mars Express snaps the same type of images from 300km overhead.
The simultaneous images of the martian sky from opposite vantage points will provide scientists with newly detailed data about the composition of the planet's atmosphere, deputy project scientist Albert Haldemann said.
Yeah...and it sucked the air out of the dems ....good timing...
You'd need one hell of a zoom lens.
Wouldn't it look pretty much like a picture of Mars as viewed from earth? Just a spot of light? (maybe with a blue tinge instead for red.)
There is such a pic. Not taken by Spirit of course. Don't have a link though.
You must be thinking of the famous "Earthrise" picture from Apollo 8, taken in lunar orbit.
A picture of Earth taken from Mars would show a small speck absent a pretty healthy telescope.
You're right. If libs had named them, it would have been Entitlement and Risky Proposition.
With the relative orbit positions of the planets right now you'd get a somewhat sideways half-moon equivalent.
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