Roving about the Red Planet
Hours are brutal and decor is dreary on the fourth and fifth floors of a midrise federal building in Pasadena, Calif. But don't look here for workplace burnout. The mood is beyond giddy, for this is headquarters of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory hard against the San Gabriel Mountains. From here are sent daily marching orders to a slightly gimpy Spirit and its twin, the lucky Opportunity, two oddly cute, golf-cart-size robot geologists with digital eyeballs on stalks and speeds up to one-tenth mile per hour as they roll across the Red Planet.
News outlets worldwide trumpeted the news in January as the rovers bounced to a stop south of the equator and on opposite sides of Mars, each with its solar panels, six wheels, flexible arm, and instrument mast folded snugly inside a cocoon of air bags. But it is the daily grind since then that has made history with an up-close Martian scouting trip far more fruitful than the pioneering but immobile Viking landers of 1976 or the shoebox-size Sojourner rover of 1997 that stayed within about 30 feet of its base station.
They are far past their nominal three-month lifetimes. While half a mile's travel was considered a decent goal, Spirit has already gone more than 2. Even better, operators say with fingers crossed, despite signs of wear they could keep rolling for another Earth year after a brief pause during the looming Martian southern hemisphere winter with its weak sunlight and bitter cold as deep as minus 157 degrees Fahrenheit.
They are well into science gravy time with their IMAX-quality pictures, mineral analyses, and weather reports. Opportunity has essentially proved that water once soaked now desiccated dirt on Mars. That builds the case that when young, it and Earth were much alike. Mars, too, may have supported life. More robots are to follow, including a bigger, nuclear-powered rover as soon as 2009. But the upshot of this year's visit is a quantum leap toward NASA's multibillion-dollar aim to put people on the next planet out from the sun to learn lessons on life's place in the universe.
Discovery. Any job must get boring sometime. But Spirit team member Larry Crumpler, a geologist from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, widens his eyes in disbelief as a visitor comments sympathetically that it must have been a tad tedious from April to mid-June. That's when Spirit made a nearly straight-line trek across the desolation of volcanic debris filling its landing site, a vast depression called Gusev Crater. "Boring? Are you kidding? " Crumpler exclaims, jumping from the seat in front of his computer in the rover's "war room," a broad space with walls and tables covered in blowup images of Mars's rubbly terrain. "Every day I can't wait to wake up; every day I see something new." He bubbles about the constantly shifting textures of the soil and boulders, especially a meteor crater named Missoula.
Geologists call a straight-line reconnaissance of virgin terrain a transect. To make the first transect on another world is, to a man like Crumpler, sublime. Prospects for great discovery now beckon to Spirit's operators from the rounded, yellow Columbia Hills where it has been since mid-June and quickly spotted odd rock formations and stones that seemed to be rotting from the inside. The team dubbed one boulder "Plymouth Rock" in tribute to the rovers' arrival at a promising new world. Another, studded with strange mineral nuggets on stalks, got the name "Pot of Gold." Opportunity for its part is examining the interior of a larger crater called Endurance, where it is finding that the thin layers of water-altered minerals at its landing site continue many feet into underlying rock.
advertisement
