Rover Opportunity Says It Is Driving on Mars

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Marc Flemming
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Rover Opportunity Says It Is Driving on Mars

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The rover Opportunity signaled to NASA scientists on Saturday that it has driven onto the surface of Mars to begin a mission to explore the planet's geological history and search for signs of water.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena checked the rover's systems before pressing a computer button at 12:26 a.m. PST (3:26 EST) that sent the rover a sequence of commands.

About 90 minutes later, JPL's mission control center erupted in cheers and strains of "Going Mobile" by The Who when a signal from the rover indicated that it had begun its drive onto the martian surface.

"The vehicle should already be on the surface at this time ... we have probably already executed egress," mission manager James Erickson said.

The team had to wait another 90 minutes for confirmation from the orbiter Odyssey that Opportunity had safely negotiated the 10-feet drive forward down a reinforced cloth ramp to the planet's surface.

The six-wheeled rover was ordered to beam photos of its new position in the Meridiani Planum to the orbiter Odyssey, which was scheduled to pass overhead at about 3:20 a.m. PST (6:20 a.m. EST).

"We expect to see pictures of the lander without the rover on it and the ground in front of us," Erickson said.

Mission control "woke" Opportunity for the drive off its landing pad on its seventh martian day, or sol 7, at 8:05 p.m. PST (11:05 p.m. EST) with Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run."

Mission control directed the rover to fire a pyrotechnic device that cut the last cable holding it to the lander, and to move forward about 4 inches to test its mobility systems in a maneuver known as an "egress bump."

"All subsystems are reporting that they are ready," Erickson said. "Everything is going fine with the vehicle. Nobody sees any reason to slow down."

The command sequences sent to Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, are boosted into space from Pasadena mission control by Deep Space Network dishes in California, Spain and Australia.

The golf cart-sized Spirit and Opportunity are each equipped with a mobile laboratory of geologic tools designed to search for evidence that the barren martian surface was once wetter, and possibly more hospitable to life, than it is now.

Opportunity has moved through its landing and exit nearly twice as fast as Spirit, which landed on the other side of the planet on Jan. 3 and rolled off its lander onto Gusev Crater 12 martian days, or sols, later.

Opportunity landed on Jan. 24 inside a small crater -- 66 feet wide and 10 feet deep -- a short distance from an outcropping of pale bedrock that scientists believe holds clues to Mars' geologic and climatic history.

Source: Reuters

01-31-2004 05:46 PM

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