[meteorite-list] Lucky Spirit and Even Luckier Opportunity Continue Their Odyssey Beyond 1, 000 Martian Days

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June05/Athena.6.8.lg.html

Lucky Spirit and even luckier Opportunity continue their odyssey 
beyond 1,000 Martian days

June 14, 2005

Cornell University News Service
Contact: Lauren Gold
Phone: (607) 255-9736
E-mail: lg34 at cornell.edu

Media Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
Phone: (607) 254-8093
E-mail: bpf2 at cornell.edu

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Luck, it has been said, favors the well prepared.

That explains, perhaps, the fortune of the plucky Mars rovers Spirit 
and Opportunity -- and their creators, including Cornell Professor 
Steve Squyres, scientific leader of the NASA mission, back on Earth.

To say June has been a good month for the Mars Expedition Rover (MER) 
team is -- well, like saying getting to Mars is a bit of a hike. The 
mission has been, for the scientists and engineers who expected the 
rovers to explore the planet for 90 days, a remarkable 17-month 
adventure.

And it's not over. On June 4, Opportunity escaped from the sand trap 
now called Purgatory Dune. And last week Spirit, in Gusev crater on 
the opposite side of Mars, discovered a basaltic rock -- valuable 
because its characteristics vary slightly from the rocks around it.

Opportunity's escape was a long-awaited thrill. The rover, which 
found itself unexpectedly mired in deep sand on Meridiani Planum on 
April 26, had been making slow, steady progress -- turning its wheels 
192 meters between May 13 and June 4. Each day, it gained a few 
centimeters.

And then, suddenly, it was free. "There was no ambiguity," said 
Squyres. "It was like night and day."

The news came in on the morning of June 4. "I knew instantly that we 
were out," said Cornell senior research associate Rob Sullivan, who 
with Jet Propulsion Laboratory mobility engineer Jeffrey Biesiadecki 
and a small group of scientists and engineers built a giant sandbox 
-- filled with sand, clay, and material used to treat swimming pools 
-- to simulate the conditions on Mars. ("We cleaned out hardware 
stores and at least one Home Depot for some of these materials," 
Sullivan said. "I think if people wanted to treat their pools that 
week, they were probably out of luck.")

Mindful that time spent in the dune was time lost from the mission, 
the team worked almost nonstop until Opportunity was free.

"We've had a feeling over the past several days that this was 
coming," Squyres wrote that evening. "Still, it's hard to describe 
how good it felt to check out the downlink and see all six wheels 
back on solid ground again. You develop pretty strong feelings for 
these vehicles once you've spent enough time with them, and when one 
of them gets into trouble you really sweat it until the trouble is 
over."

The following Tuesday found the black-cowboy-booted Squyres in his 
office in the Space Sciences Building, chatting easily with students 
between MER planning teleconferences.

"I don't think I realized how nervous I was about being stuck," he 
said. "Until we got unstuck."

With Opportunity now in the clear, its next assignment is to turn 180 
degrees and examine the treacherous area with its sensing arm. Images 
of the dune sent back by the rover's panoramic camera, or Pancam, 
already indicate that all six wheels dug more deeply into the soil 
than any previous intentional wheel-trenching activity (in which only 
one wheel is used to dig a shallower hole).  "There are these deep 
ruts, like little mini-canyons," said Jim Bell, Pancam team leader 
and Cornell professor of astronomy. Understanding their composition 
and origin will help the team spot and avoid similar traps as 
Opportunity picks up its journey toward Erebus crater.

Just half a kilometer to the south, Erebus is another mystery. Unlike 
the dark, hematite-rich ground Opportunity has spent its time on so 
far, the crater looks intriguingly bright.

The brightness may be exposed bedrock, says Bell -- or it may be 
something else entirely. "I would say bedrock is a good working 
hypothesis, but we haven't seen it up close," says Bell. "And whether 
it's the same kind of bedrock we've seen at Eagle crater (where 
Opportunity landed) and Endurance Crater (whose rim it explored last 
year), we don't know. We're just antsy to get there."

So far, both rovers have found strong evidence that Mars was once wet 
enough to support life. From Opportunity, the evidence has been orbs 
of hematite "blueberries" in Eagle crater and rippled patterns in 
bedrock; from Spirit it's been high chlorine, bromine and sulfur 
levels in the Columbia Hills.

And concern for Opportunity aside, no one is neglecting Spirit. The 
first rover launched crossed a symbolic milestone June 3, completing 
its 500th sol (a sol is a Martian day, which lasts 24 hours, 39 
minutes and 35 seconds) at work on the planet.

Faithfully toiling in the Columbia Hills, Spirit had its own touch of 
luck last week.

For weeks Spirit has been doing meticulous strike and dip 
measurements, collecting data scientists need to work out a history 
of geologic events in the area. (Strike is the compass direction of a 
horizontal line on an inclined plane; dip is the angle of inclination 
measured from the horizontal.) The rover was about to set out on a 
complex drive south when its mini-thermal emission spectrometer 
(Mini-TES, which measures infrared radiation) caught a glimpse of the 
rock now called Backstay.

"Backstay was different than anything we saw before," said Squyres. 
"It's a loose rock, not bedrock, so maybe it was ejected from 
someplace farther away, or someplace deeper. The Mini-TES spectrum is 
nothing wildly exotic . . . the thing certainly seems to be some kind 
of basalt. But if it's a flavor of basalt we haven't seen before, 
then it's definitely worth a quick look."

As serendipity would have it, he added, the rover's drive that day 
took it to within four meters of the rock. "It was like we were meant 
to be there."

Over the next few days, Spirit used its Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) to 
brush the rock clean for its Alpha particle X-ray spectrometer 
(APXS), which confirmed the basalt's different composition.

	On Thursday night, as Spirit examined Backstay, planners sent 
the next sol's instructions up to Opportunity. It was their 1,000th 
uplink.

"For people who aren't on the project, that probably doesn't matter," 
said Squyres. "But it's what we do. And we've done it 1,000 times 
now, and that's a big deal."

"Actually," he added, "we're up to 1,003 now. It just keeps going."

Luck? Probably not. Luck, after all, only goes so far.

But then there's careful planning and persistence; dedication and flexibility.

And like jaunty black cowboy boots, those never go out of style.