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Spirit Ready to Drive Onto Mars Surface



 
 
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Old January 15th 04, 05:09 PM
Ron
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Default Spirit Ready to Drive Onto Mars Surface

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Guy Webster (818) 354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Donald Savage (202) 358-1547
NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

NEWS RELEASE: 2004-19 January 14, 2004

Spirit Ready to Drive Onto Mars Surface

NASA's Spirit completed a three-stage turn early today, the last step
before a drive planned early Thursday to take the rover off its lander
platform and onto martian soil for the first time.

"We are very excited about where we are today. We've just completed
the exploration of our lander and we're ready to explore Mars," said
Kevin Burke of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.,
leader of the engineering team that planned the rover's egress from
the lander. "We are headed in a north-northwest direction. That is our
exit path, and we're sitting just where we want to be."

Late tonight, mission managers at JPL plan to send the command for
Spirit to drive forward 3 meters (10 feet), enough to get all six
wheels onto the soil.

After the move, one of the rover's first jobs will be to locate the
Sun with its panoramic camera and calculate from the Sun's position
how to point its main antenna at Earth, JPL's Jennifer Trosper,
mission manager, explained.

On Friday, Spirit's science team will take advantage of special
possibilities presented by the European Space Agency's Mars Express
orbiter flying almost directly overhead, about 300 kilometers (186
miles) high. Mars Express successfully entered orbit around Mars last
month. Spirit will be looking up while Mars Express uses three
instruments to look down.

"This is an historic opportunity," said Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington
University in St. Louis, deputy principal investigator for the science
instruments on Spirit and on its twin Mars Exploration Rover,
Opportunity. "The intent is to get observations from above and to get
observations from below at the same time to do the best possible job
of determining the dynamics of the atmosphere." The Mars Express
observations are also expected to supplement earlier information from
two NASA Mars orbiters about the surface minerals and landforms in
Spirit's neighborhood within Gusev Crater.

Mars Express will be looking down with a high-resolution stereo
camera, a spectrometer for identifying minerals in infrared and
visible wavelengths, and another spectrometer for studying atmospheric
circulation and composition. Spirit will be looking up with its
panoramic camera and its infrared spectrometer.

Dr. Michael Smith of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt,
Md., reported how Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer can
be used to assess the temperatures in Mars' atmosphere from near the
planet's surface to several kilometers or miles high. Spirit's
measurements are most sensitive for the lower portion of the
atmosphere, while Mars Express' measurements will be most sensitive
for the upper atmosphere, he said.
Spirit arrived at Mars Jan. 3 (EST and PST; Jan. 4 Universal Time)
after a seven-month journey. In coming weeks and months, according to
plans, it will be exploring for clues in rocks and soil to decipher
whether the past environment in Gusev Crater was ever watery and
possibly suitable to sustain life.
Opportunity will reach Mars on Jan. 25 (EST and Universal Time; 9:05
p.m., Jan. 24, PST) to begin a similar examination of a site on the
opposite side of the planet from Gusev Crater. As of Thursday morning,
Opportunity will have flown 438 million kilometers (272 million miles)
since launch and will still have 18 million kilometers (11 million
miles) to go before landing.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space
Science, Washington, D.C. Images and additional information about the
project are available from JPL at

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov

and from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., at

http://athena.cornell.edu/

-end-
 




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