[meteorite-list] Opportunity Mars Rover Is Free!

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun Jun 5 00:51:47 2005
Message-ID: <200506050451.j554p8m06781_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://athena.cornell.edu/news/mubss/

MER Mission Update by Steve Squyres
June 4, 2005

We're out! The Sol 484 downlink from Opportunity just hit the ground, and all
six wheels are on top of soil. More later when I've got some details, but I
wanted to get the news out now while it's hot. We've been confident all along
that thi s would happen but still... what a relief!

Boy, this has been a good day.

We've had a feeling over the past several days that this was coming.
On each of the last few drives, the rover slipped a little bit less
than it had been for most of the extraction. In addition, the right
bogey (the part of the suspension that the right middle and right
wheels are mounted on) recently started moving in a way that
suggested that the wheels were finally coming over the crest of the
dune. And we knew from all our earth-based testing that when a stuck
rover breaks free, it tends to do it very abruptly. So all the signs
were suggesting that the big breakout was almost upon us. Still, it's
hard to describe how good it felt to check out the downlink this
morning 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.

So what comes next? The first thing we're going to do is simply take a
very hard look at the stuff we were stuck in. Much of the worst terrain
was under the belly of the rover through all of this, down where we
couldn't see it. From our new position, everything that was under us
for all those weeks is now visible. So we're going to take a little
while just to look at where we were. We may also turn to take a look
at our tracks (or trenches, or whatever you want to call them) with
some of the instruments on the arm. But we'll see about that one...
we'll only do it if we're convinced it's safe.

After that -- and there is no timetable for any of this -- we will
begin a cautious set of moves to get us on our way again. And just so
there's no doubt about it, this little incident is not going to deter
us from continuing our southward exploration. South is where we think
the best science is, and we're not going to turn tail and run because
of one unfortunate episode. Now if we find after continued driving that
the southward road is simply impossible, then it'll be time to start
thinking about something else. But for now, south is where we plan to go.

And lest I forget our other baby in all the excitement... Spirit is
doing very nicely. We were just about to hit the gas and head on out of
here, but in the last couple of days something interesting and unexpected
came up. Mini-TES, our infrared spectrometer, is a very nice
compositional survey instrument. In other words, it's a tool we can use
quickly to look around and learn something about what rocks are made of.
We've been doing lots of Mini-TES observations on the rocks around Spirit
for awhile now, it's gotten to the point that nearly every rock type is
pretty familiar. But late last week, we came across a rock called Backstay
that looks, to Mini-TES, a bit different from anything we've ever seen
before. It's a loose rock, not bedrock, so it may be a piece of impact
ejecta from someplace far away. 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. And luckily, a quick look is possible. Just about
the time that we realized that Backstay was something interesting, our
most recent drive had put us just four meters away from it. So the plan
for the next few sols is to drive to Backstay and figure out what it is
before moving on to anything new.

Time to go celebrate...
Received on Sun 05 Jun 2005 12:51:07 AM PDT


Help support this free mailing list:



StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
reddit
Yahoo MyWeb