The destination - a crater 170 meters from the vehicle's current location * A long trip to Spirit is expected, says the mission manager
Five weeks after landing on Mars, the Spirit is about to move its wheels on the rocky soil of the Red Planet in a wandering journey that can last a month and in which the robot will cover tens or even hundreds of meters/
The scientists plan to start driving Spirit starting today after it finishes analyzing the volcanic rock, as well as digging into the basalt block.
NASA engineers were able to repair the Spirit after it suffered computer glitches that caused it to be down for weeks, glitches that interfered with its mission to search for evidence that Mars was once friendly to life. Its twin, the Opportunity spacecraft meanwhile landed on the other side of the Red Equator.
"I think it's safe to say that our patient is healthy," Spirit mission director Jennifer Trosper said at a news conference Friday at JPL. The engineers deleted files from Spirit's flash memory and then reformatted that memory, thus ending two and a half weeks of crisis mode, a nerve-racking period according to Trosper. However, in the end, the vehicle did what was asked of it and it is now fully performing its role," she said.
NASA demonstrated Spirit's ability to establish two-way communication with Earth using the European Mars Express as a relay station. Spirit and Opportunity can also communicate with Earth via the Mars Odyssey 2001 and Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft orbiting Mars, as well as directly to Earth.
Meanwhile, Opportunity also went on a short trip to a rock that interested the scientists and they want to examine it for details, mission manager Matt Wallace said. Engineers are now working to compensate for wheel slippage on the dry ground of Mars.
NASA requests that Opportunity investigate the stratified earth in the area previously observed by Opportunity. The scientists believe that the layers may have been formed by stratification by water. If this is indeed the case, it is some kind of geological information for which the two vehicles were sent.
Opportunity will spend several weeks in a crater about 24 meters in diameter where some of the soil appeared to be rich in hematite, an iron-rich mineral that usually forms in the presence of flowing water.
Spirit, on the other hand, will travel even further - towards a crater located about 170 meters from the current location of the vehicle to find similar evidence of the presence of water. The journey may last a month. "It's going to be a long driving mission for Spirit." Trusper said.
And in the meantime it was announced that the Spirit space vehicle drilled a small hole in the rock on the Martian soil for the first time this weekend. The rock seems to be made of basalt, that is, a volcanic stone. "We made history here, we made the first planned hole on Mars," said Stefan Gurban, one of the scientists overseeing the Spirit work.
The drilling tool made a hole 2.7 millimeters deep in the rock. The round hole, which is 45 millimeters wide, gives scientists the opportunity to learn a little about the geological past of Mars. "The rock raised difficulties, we had to work for three hours to drill so deep," said Gurban.
The Spirit has been on Mars for at least a month as part of a $280 million mission that also includes the "Opportunity" twin vehicle, which explores another part of the planet. Opportunity cameras took pictures of rock layers that could have formed in the water. The equipment on the vehicle will reveal more information about the origin of the rock layers, and if water - the basic requirement for life - was ever present on the planet.
The Spirit, who was paralyzed for more than two weeks due to computer problems, performed the drilling in the rock while standing still. The scientists hope that it will be able to start moving and exploring the surface of the star in the coming days.
