1,000 days on Mars

Posted: Thursday, October 26, 2006 5:30 AM by Alan Boyle

NASA / JPL / Cornell

A true-color version of NASA's "McMurdo Panorama" shows the terrain surrounding the Spirit Rover at its Martian winter haven in the Columbia Hills.

The milestone, and the picture, come on the heels of a hilarious parody in The Onion that's based on the assumption that Spirit is getting bored and depressed up there. The truth is that the Mars rover team is overjoyed with the performance put in by Spirit as well as Opportunity, its robotic sibling on the other side of the planet.

If there's any anthropomorphizing going on, Spirit tends to be seen as the tough, blue-collar robot, plugging away despite adversity, while Opportunity is the "Little Miss Perfect" of Mars exploration. At least that's the way top rover scientist Steve Squyres described them almost two years ago, when he voiced amazement that the darn things were still going after one Earth year.

Even though one of Spirit's six wheels is gimpy, things are looking up: The depths of winter have passed, and in two weeks Spirit is due to come out of a troublesome period for radio communications caused by the sun's position directly between Earth and Mars. Even during the current downtime, Spirit is sending an average of 15 megabits of data daily, via a relay on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Those bits include pictures as well as information about the Martian atmosphere, dust properties and surface composition.

Scientists are already using the McMurdo Panorama - which was assembled from almost 500 megabytes' worth of data, captured in 1,449 separate images - to plot Spirit's course once the sunshine gets strong enough to restart the robot's perambulations.

In today's advisory about the 1,000th Martian day of operations (which actually comes on Thursday), the rover team says Spirit's next destination will be a "nearby spot on Low Ridge to access different rock and soil samples while maintaining a good solar panel tilt toward the sun for the rest of the Martian winter."

Meanwhile, Opportunity is going strong on the rim of Victoria Crater in Meridiani Planum, and sending back its own selection of jaw-dropping images. It's particularly intriguing to see the raw images from the rovers, which have yet to be assembled into finished color views. Of course, some of those raw images merely show the sun or the rovers' color-calibration targets, so you have to be selective.

To keep up with all of NASA's Red Planet missions - including the latest arrival, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - check out the space agency's Web portal as well as our own "Return to the Red Planet" section. 

Update for 5:30 a.m. PT  Oct. 26: In response to my query about the 1,000th Martian day of operation, also known as Sol 1000, top rover scientist Steve Squyres sent in this e-mail from Europe, where he's currently traveling:

"Yeah, Sol 1000 is a milestone for us... although personally I'm going to hold off on celebrating until we know for sure that we've actually made it to Sol 1000! There's no reason to think otherwise, of course. But right now both rovers are in superior conjunction - the period of time when Mars is out of sight behind the sun. As expected, we haven't heard from either vehicle for about a week and a half, and we don't expect to until early next week. Considering how far Spirit is past warranty, I think that'll be the time to celebrate! For now, we're just enjoying this brief forced vacation from daily flight operations.

"Regarding what's next for Spirit ... for the past several months the rover has been sunning itself on a north-facing slope, waiting for winter to end. Spring is now on its way, and the amount of solar power we have is creeping upward. Once we're ready to move again - which should be fairly soon - the plan is to head back to Home Plate, a place that we explored briefly before the start of winter. Home Plate was so interesting, and our time there was so short, that we've still got some unfinished business to take care of."

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