The Mars rover Spirit completed its first real activity on Thursday, brushing away dust from the surface of a rock after two weeks of sitting motionless on the Martian surface.
The rover had remained idle following computer memory problems which resulted in an almost total loss of communication with mission control.
Spirit used its Rock Abrasion Tool to brush dust from the surface of a rock called Adirondack, and then take microscopic images and spectroscopic data of its cleaned surface.
Depending on their assessment of those images, the NASA science team will decide whether Spirit should take the next step of actually grinding into the rock surface, or to begin moving away from this initial site, just two metres from its lander, and off toward a crater that lies about 200 metres away.
Advertisement
This journey could begin as early as Friday, or as late as Sunday, depending on that decision. Since most of the rocks around Spirit’s landing site seem to be basalt – volcanic rocks that were also the predominant type in the sites visited by the three previous landers that have reached Mars successfully – the science team has decided not to take any further rock data in the immediate area. Instead Spirit will make a beeline to the crater as quickly as possible.
Hazardous terrain
The trip should take several weeks because until the team gains experience with travel on Mars they will not take chances by letting Spirit move farther in a day than it can see with its forward-looking navigation cameras.
The craft’s computer is equipped to navigate hazardous terrain on its own, but that will not be attempted until much later in the mission.
Spirit has now been declared fully restored to normal after the team overcame its computer memory problems. After several delays, Spirit’s flash memory, whose operations were the cause of the craft’s problems, was finally wiped clean and reformatted early Wednesday night. The success comes as a relief to engineers who had been concerned there might be some undetected software bug involved in the problem, which might also have affected the twin rover Opportunity.
Opportunity, meanwhile, completed its initial trip early Friday, reaching the left-hand end of a long outcrop of bedrock. That end, which hooks toward the lander and has been dubbed “snout,” will now be examined at close range by the craft’s high resolution panoramic camera and mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer.
At that point, the team will decide whether to deploy the instrument arm to take microscopic images and spectroscopy, or to begin its trip along the rock face immediately. That trip is expected to take two or three days. Because Opportunity’s site in a small crater on Meridiani Planum is filled with interesting features, it is expected to stay there for a few weeks.
