- PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters)
- The U.S. robotic rover on Mars has suffered some minor technical problems
that will delay by three days its planned landing pad roll-off to search
for signs of water in an arid rock-strewn crater, officials at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory said on Wednesday.
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- The rover Spirit now is set to drive onto the rocky,
wind-scoured surface of Mars next Wednesday, or "sol 12" in Mars
time, a development that has scientists "champing at the bit"
to "get down in the dirt and take some measurements," geologist
Ray Arvidson said.
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- Spirit is equipped with an array of cutting-edge scientific
tools on its movable arm that will allow the NASA team to take the closest
look yet at the mineral composition of the Martian soil and landscape.
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- Arvidson said the science team was studying high resolution
color photos taken by the rover's twin panoramic cameras, as well as data
from a mass spectrometer to determine where the rover would go first in
its search for signs of water in the rocks and soil. The team chose to
land inside the massive Gusev Crater because they believe it once held
a lake.
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- "Once we egress we want to stop and drop and make
measurements that have never been made before," he said. "There's
a lot to do in the immediate vicinity of the lander just to see what is
there."
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- Meanwhile, NASA administrators took time during "sol
four," the rover's fourth day on the red planet, to dedicate the rover's
landing site to the memory of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia, who
perished last February when the spacecraft broke apart while re-entering
Earth's atmosphere.
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- "In our personal lives in moments of great joy ...
we often remember and long for lost members of our family," Firouz
Naderi, Mars program manager, told reporters on Wednesday. "And so
it is in this moment of triumph in our professional lives that we remember
members of our NASA family that we lost with the space shuttle Columbia."
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- NASA engineers designed a plaque for the rover's main
antenna memorializing the seven-member Columbia crew, and the landing site
was named the Columbia Memorial Station.
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- Two glitches in Spirit's otherwise flawless performance
have delayed the rover's first drive off the lander by three days. On Tuesday
night, NASA engineers fixed a "stickiness" that hampered their
efforts to point the rover's main antenna directly at Earth.
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- The team planned to retract two airbags that blocked
the six-wheeled rover's exit path with a "lift and retract" maneuver
on Wednesday night, or sol five, Art Thompson, rover technical lead, said.
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- Another NASA team was keeping an eye on a retreating
dust storm that could cause problems for the Jan. 25 landing of Spirit's
twin, Opportunity, which is headed for the opposite side of the planet.
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- Spirit is the fourth probe to successfully land on Mars,
following in the footsteps of two Viking landers in the 1970s and the Pathfinder
mission in 1997.
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