Category: Mars

Image credit: NASA/JPL

NASA’s Opportunity rover successfully landed on the surface of Mars early Sunday morning, giving the agency two successful landings this month. The spacecraft landed in a region of Mars called Meridiani Planum which is on the opposite side of the planet from Gusev Crater. Initial estimates placed the rover about 24 km down range from the centre of the target area, but well within the regions of hematite which could be an indication of past water. Unlike Spirit, Opportunity landed on its side and righted itself when it opened the petals of its lander. Opportunity’s airbags aren’t blocking the exit ramp, so there won’t be a problem when the rover rolls out onto the Martian surface.

NASA’s second Mars Exploration Rover successfully sent signals to Earth during its bouncy landing and after it came to rest on one of the three side petals of its four-sided lander.

Mission engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., received the first signal from Opportunity on the ground at 9:05 p.m. Pacific Standard Time Saturday via the NASA Deep Space Network, which was listening with antennas in California and Australia.

“We’re on Mars, everybody!” JPL’s Rob Manning, manager for development of the landing system, announced to the cheering flight team.

NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe said at a subsequent press briefing, “This was a tremendous testament to how NASA, when really focused on an objective, can put every ounce of effort, energy, emotion and talent to an important task. This team is the best in the world, no doubt about it.”

Opportunity landed in a region called Meridiani Planum, halfway around the planet from the Gusev Crater site where its twin rover, Spirit, landed three weeks ago. Earlier today, mission managers reported progress in understanding and dealing with communications and computer problems on Spirit.

“In the last 48 hours, we’ve been on a roller coaster,” said Dr. Ed Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space science. “We resurrected one rover and saw the birth of another.”

JPL’s Pete Theisinger, project manager for the rovers, said, “We are two for two. Here we are tonight with Spirit on a path to recovery and with Opportunity on Mars.”

By initial estimates, Opportunity landed about 24 kilometers (15 miles) down range from the center of the target landing area. That is well within an outcropping of a mineral called gray hematite, which usually forms in the presence of water. “We’re going to have a good place to do science,” said JPL’s Richard Cook, deputy project manager for the rovers.

Once it pushed itself upright by opening the petals of the lander, Opportunity was expected to be facing east.

The main task for both rovers in coming months is to explore the areas around their landing sites for evidence in rocks and soils about whether those areas ever had environments that were watery and possibly suitable for sustaining life.

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. 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 .

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL

NASA engineers have been working overtime to reestablish communications with the Spirit rover after it mysteriously stopped talking to mission control on Wednesday just before it executed an experiment to grind a few millimeters into a rock. They did receive a reassuring confirmation on Thursday that Spirit was receiving transmissions from Earth; although, it hasn’t sent any data back yet. The engineers aren’t sure what caused the problem, but since they did get that confirmation, it’s probably not in the power system, radio, transmitter or some software. A very slow communications link was established on Friday morning, but it’s still unclear exactly what’s wrong or if it’s repairable.

NASA’s Spirit rover communicated with Earth in a signal detected by NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna complex near Madrid, Spain, at 12:34 Universal Time (4:34 a.m. PST) this morning.

The transmissions came during a communication window about 90 minutes after Spirit woke up for the morning on Mars. The signal lasted for 10 minutes at a data rate of 10 bits per second.

Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., plan to send commands to Spirit seeking additional data from the spacecraft during the subsequent few hours.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Additional information about the project is available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., at http://athena.cornell.edu.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Image credit: ESA

The European Space Agency has gathered a mountain of new data from the Mars Express orbiter, which shows the Red Planet in unprecedented resolution – over the course of the last few weeks it’s gathered more than 100 GB of data. Its photographs show details as fine as sediments left on the bottom of river valleys and dust blowing over the rim of craters. The spacecraft is also detecting water being lost from the Martian atmosphere for the first time. Unfortunately, Mars Express still has yet to detect the British-built Beagle 2 lander, which went missing on December 25, 2003.

Mars Express, ESA?s first mission to Mars, will reach its final orbit on 28 January. It has already been producing stunning results since its first instrument was switched on, on 5 January. The significance of the first data was emphasised by the scientists at a European press conference today at ESA?s Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany.

“I did not expect to be able to gather together – just one month after the Mars Orbit Insertion of 25 December ? so many happy scientists eager to present their first results”, said Professor David Southwood, ESA Director of Science. One of the main targets of the Mars Express mission is to discover the presence of water in one of its chemical states. Through the initial mapping of the South polar cap on 18 January, OMEGA, the combined camera and infrared spectrometer, has already revealed the presence of water ice and carbon dioxide ice.

This information was confirmed by the PFS, a new high-resolution spectrometer of unprecedented accuracy. The first PFS data also show that the carbon oxide distribution is different in the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars.

The MaRS instrument, a sophisticated radio transmitter and receiver, emitted a first signal successfully on 21 January that was received on Earth through a 70- metre antenna in Australia after it was reflected and scattered from the surface of Mars. This new measurement technique allows the detection of the chemical composition of the Mars atmosphere, ionosphere and surface.

ASPERA, a plasma and energetic neutral atoms analyser, is aiming to answer the fundamental question of whether the solar wind erosion led to the present lack of water on Mars. The preliminary results show a difference in the characteristics between the impact of the solar wind area and the measurement made in the tail of Mars. Another exciting experiment was run by the SPICAM instrument (an ultraviolet and infrared spectrometer) during the first star occultation ever made at Mars. It has simultaneously measured the distribution of the ozone and water vapour, which has never been done before, revealing that there is more water vapour where there is less ozone.

ESA also presented astonishing pictures produced with the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). They represent the outcome of 1.87 million km2 of Martian surface coverage, and about 100 gigabytes of processed data. This camera was also able to make the longest swath (up to 4000 km) and largest area in combination with high resolution ever taken in the exploration of the Solar System.

This made it possible to create an impressive picture 24 metres long by 1.3 metres high, which was carried through the conference room at the end of the press event by a group of 10-year-old children.

Mrs Edelgard Bulmahn, German Minister for Research and Education, who is also chair of the ESA Council at Ministerial level, said at the press conference: “Europe can be proud of this mission: Mars Express is an enormous success for the European Space Programme.”

Original Source: ESA News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL

A thunderstorm in Australia has hampered communications between NASA and the Spirit rover on Mars. The rover was supposed to use its Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) to grind into the rock 5 mm, but the weather interfered with the commands sent from Earth. When it doesn’t receive orders from Earth, Spirit goes into a stasis mode where it runs checks on its systems, and takes photographs of its surroundings. Engineers are hoping to try again tonight.

Ground controllers were able to send commands to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit early Wednesday and received a simple signal acknowledging that the rover heard them, but they did not receive expected scientific and engineering data during scheduled communication passes during the rest of that martian day.

Project managers have not yet determined the cause, but similar events occurred several times during the Mars Pathfinder mission. The team is examining a number of different scenarios, some of which would be resolved when the rover wakes up after powering down at the end of the martian day (around midday Pacific time Wednesday).

The next opportunity to hear from the vehicle is when the rover may attempt to communicate with the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter at about 8:30 p.m. Pacific time tonight. A second communication opportunity may occur about two hours later during a relay pass via the Mars Odyssey orbiter. If necessary, the flight team will take additional recovery steps early Thursday morning (the morning of sol 19 on Mars) when the rover wakes up and can communicate directly with Earth.

Full details on the rover’s status will be described in the next daily news conference Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will be broadcast live on NASA Television.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Image credit: Beagle2

Controllers initiated a state of radio silence with the Beagle 2 lander after it failed to report in, or communicate through Mars Express. In theory this radio silence should force Beagle 2 to enter into “Communication Mode 2”, where it attempts to call out constantly throughout the Martian day. The best opportunities to make contact with the lander will happen on the nights of January 24/25 when Mars Express passes over a significant portion of the landing area.

On 12 January a period of radio silence was initiated when no attempts were made to contact Beagle 2. Maintaining radio silence for a period of ten days is intended to force Beagle 2 into a communication mode that should ensure that the transmitter is switched on for the majority of the daytime on Mars and thus will improve the chance of the Mars Express orbiter making contact.

During this ten-day period Mars Express has listened for Beagle 2 but only for very short periods when Beagle 2 may not have been switched on.

The ten-day radio silence period ends today [22 January], just before a fly-over by Mars Express. However, it is not intended to hail the Lander immediately. This cautious approach is based on the fact that the end of the ten-day period of radio silence cannot be predicted with total confidence. This is because the absolute accuracy of the timer on Beagle 2 could have been affected by the temperature on Mars, making the clock run slightly faster or slower than predicted.

It has therefore been decided to choose a pair of opportunities when Mars Express flies over the Beagle 2 landing site, namely the nights of 24 and 25 January. These two flights cover the widest possible area where Beagle 2 should be, giving the best chance of calling the Lander and getting a response from the continuous transmission.

The results from these latest attempts to communicate with Beagle 2 will be announced by Prof. Colin Pillinger, Beagle 2 Lead Scientist and Dr. Mark Sims, Beagle 2 Mission Manager, on 26 January, at a media briefing to be held at The Science Media Centre, The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS, at 1400 GMT.

Original Source: PPARC News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL

Spirit is reaching out to test the nearby rock, “Adirondack”, which controllers targeted to get a better understanding of its composition and origin; it will be performing a series of tests today and tonight. The rover already used its instruments to examine a patch of soil near the lander and found some surprising results: the soil in Gusev Crater seems volcanic in origin, not sedimentary. Its instruments have also found the presence of a mineral called olivine, which doesn’t resist weathering very well and is normally evidence of volcanic deposits.

The first use of the tools on the arm of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit reveals puzzles about the soil it examined and raises anticipation about what the tool will find during its studies of a martian rock.

Today and overnight tonight, Spirit is using its microscope and two up-close spectrometers on a football-sized rock called Adirondack, said Jennifer Trosper, mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

“We’re really happy with the way the spacecraft continues to work for us,” Trosper said. The large amount of data — nearly 100 megabits — transmitted from Spirit in a single relay session through NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft today “is like getting an upgrade to our Internet connection.”

Scientists today reported initial impressions from using Spirit’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, Moessbauer spectrometer and microscopic imager on a patch of soil that was directly in front of the rover after Spirit drove off its lander Jan. 15.

“We’re starting to put together a picture of what the soil at this particular place in Gusev Crater is like. There are some puzzles and there are surprises,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the suite of instruments on Spirit and on Spirit’s twin, Opportunity.

One unexpected finding was the Moessbauer spectrometer’s detection of a mineral called olivine, which does not survive weathering well. This spectrometer identifies different types of iron-containing minerals; scientists believe many of the minerals on Mars contain iron. “This soil contains a mixture of minerals, and each mineral has its own distinctive Moessbauer pattern, like a fingerprint,” said Dr. Goestar Klingelhoefer of Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, lead scientist for this instrument.

The lack of weathering suggested by the presence of olivine might be evidence that the soil particles are finely ground volcanic material, Squyres said. Another possible explanation is that the soil layer where the measurements were taken is extremely thin, and the olivine is actually in a rock under the soil.

Scientists were also surprised by how little the soil was disturbed when Spirit’s robotic arm pressed the Moessbauer spectrometer’s contact plate directly onto the patch being examined. Microscopic images from before and after that pressing showed almost no change. “I thought it would scrunch down the soil particles,” Squyres said. “Nothing collapsed. What is holding these grains together?”

Information from another instrument on the arm, an alpha particle X- ray spectrometer, may point to an answer. This instrument “measures X-ray radiation emitted by Mars samples, and from this data we can derive the elemental composition of martian soils and rocks,” said Dr. Johannes Brueckner, rover science team member from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany. The instrument found the most prevalent elements in the soil patch were silicon and iron. It also found significant levels of chlorine and sulfur, characteristic of soils at previous martian landing sites but unlike soil composition on Earth.

Squyres said, “There may be sulfates and chlorides binding the little particles together.” Those types of salts could be left behind by evaporating water, or could come from volcanic eruptions, he said. The soil may not have even originated anywhere near Spirit’s landing site, because Mars has dust storms that redistribute fine particles around the planet. The next target for use of the rover’s full set of instruments is a rock, which is more likely to have originated nearby.

Spirit landed in the Connecticut-sized Gusev Crater on Jan. 3 (EST and PST; Jan. 4 Universal Time). In coming weeks and months, according to plans, it will examine rocks and soil for clues about whether the past environment there was ever watery and possibly suitable to sustaining life. Spirit’s twin Mars Exploration Rover, 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.

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 .

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Image credit: NASA

Before humans can take the first tentative steps onto the Martian surface, our robots will have spent many years examining the planet to let us know exactly what to expect. Spirit and Opportunity will examine the dirt to see if there’s water that can be extracted. They’ll also examine the dust to see if it contains chemicals that could be detrimental to humans if it was inhaled. Robots will also help us figure out the best location humans should go to maybe mine for subsurface reserves of water or stay protected from the solar radiation.

Around the same time when Spirit?s older sister, Sojourner, was testing rover technologies on Mars during the Pathfinder mission in 1997, Mars Exploration Rover soil scientist, Doug Ming, was ?living off the martian land,? locked away in a biosphere for 30 days, sacrificing his normal life on Earth to experience ?living? on Mars. ?We simulated how astronauts would work, eat, and conduct experiments on Mars, and we even had to recycle our own urine – create purified water from it – to survive the sparse water resources on Mars,? laughed Ming.

After 15 years of researching plant growth systems and irrigation techniques for humans to use both on the Moon and Mars, Doug Ming is currently utilizing the Spirit rover to further understand the nitty-gritty composition of the dirt on Mars. His analysis will help meet the mission goal of understanding whether Gusev Crater was ever a lake. In the long term, however, studies of soil characteristics will help future scientists develop ways to extract useful materials for their colonies and safely arrive and survive on the red planet.

Humans Need Oxygen, Water, and Shelter on Mars
?In NASA?s Advanced Life Support Program, we regenerate the air by using plants to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen in closed chambers. To live safely on Mars, which has 95% carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, we?ll have to create a lot of technology tricks like that to survive,? explained Ming. Explorers visiting Mars will have to live in habitats where the oxygen is regenerated, wear spacesuits with oxygen masks, drive radiation-proof vehicles, and grow food by adding nutrients to the ?topsoil? that currently seems unable to nourish plants. But before astronauts can do all of these activities on Mars, robots need to teach humans where and how to land, where to build, and how to survive in the harsh martian environment. ?The Mini-TES instrument on Spirit is searching for water bound in soils and rocks on Mars. Water bound up in the soil and rocks could be extracted by astronauts to use as nourishment for themselves or fuel for their machines,? said Ming.

Science instruments on Spirit’s robotic arm will provide information on the martian environment that may be helpful for future human explorers.

Dirt That Hurts
?We?re also studying the chemical composition of the soil on Mars with our M?ssbauer Spectrometer and APXS instruments, which will tell us what chemicals might be detrimental to humans if they inhale the dust. For example, trace metals could be toxic to lungs, and dust could also affect electronic devices like computers and vehicles that humans will need on Mars. We?re also concerned that dust and soil could have the potential to develop electric charges. We?re taking pictures and making ?mini-movies? of dust devils that will better help us understand dust and soil movement on Mars? said Ming.

Location, Location, Location
Where should humans land on Mars? Where does enough subsurface water ice exist that humans could drill and extract? Where does the radiation penetrate the surface the least to prevent sickness and cancer-causing exposure to humans? Where is the ground strong enough to withstand a heavy human-filled mini-apartment building with parking spots for martian cars and spaceships? How do you enter the martian atmosphere with a spaceship at least thirty times larger and heavier than any spaceship humans have ever sent to Mars?

Scientists and engineers must figure out the answers to these complicated questions through the knowledge they gain from the robots sent before humans. ?Engineers and navigators will study how hot the spacecraft heat shield got as it entered the martian atmosphere, which will help future engineers model, design, and build heat shields that will ultimately protect humans as they land on Mars,? explained Ming. The The Martian Radiation Environment Experiment on NASA?s Mars Odyssey orbiter already successfully calculated that the radiation exposure on the way to Mars is twice the amount of radiation exposure that humans encounter in low-Earth orbit. Scientists are currently taking that data to model what the radiation levels would be on the surface of Mars to help build protective materials for humans during the flight to Mars and living on Mars.

Robots Pave the Way for Humans
?First and foremost, the Mars Exploration Rover mission and every mission to Mars are scientifically exciting in the present because we instantly learn about our neighboring planet. By comparing Earth to Mars, we learn more about how to protect our home planet,? said Ming. But, everything we learn now will also help us grow and evolve as explorers at exponential levels for the future. ?Space navigators still incorporate sky charts drawn by Babylonian star gazers to send spacecraft on a perfect trajectory to Mars today. Humans going to Mars – soon or even thousands of years from now – will depend on what we learn from our current robotic missions to create the right spacesuits, habitats, and roving vehicles humans will someday drive on Mars,? said Ming. ?Robots will probably even deliver our first building materials to Mars, so when humans first land, robots will have paved the way for us in more ways than one,? said Ming.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit drove a few metres yesterday to get nice and close to a large rock nearby the landing site which scientists have dubbed “Adirondack”. Spirit will examine the rock with its microscope and two instruments that will reveal its composition. To make the drive to this rock, Spirit turned 40-degrees and then rolled 1.9 metres. Engineers are still taking “baby steps” with Spirit, since this first target took the rover 30 minutes to travel.

NASA’s Spirit rover has successfully driven to its first target on Mars, a football-sized rock that scientists have dubbed Adirondack.

The Mars Exploration Rover flight team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., plans to send commands to Spirit early Tuesday to examine Adirondack with a microscope and two instruments that reveal the composition of rocks, said JPL’s Dr. Mark Adler, Spirit mission manager. The instruments are the M?ssbauer spectrometer and the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer.

Spirit successfully rolled off the lander and onto the martian surface last Thursday. To make the drive to Adirondack, the rover turned 40 degrees in short arcs totaling 95 centimeters (3.1 feet). It then turned in place to face the target rock and drove four short moves straightforward totaling 1.9 meters (6.2 feet). The moves covered a span of 30 minutes on Sunday, though most of that was sitting still and taking pictures between moves. The total amount of time when Spirit was actually moving was about two minutes.

“These are the sorts of baby steps we’re taking,” said JPL’s Dr. Eddie Tunstel, rover mobility engineer.

“The drive was designed for two purposes, one of which was to get to the rock,” Tunstel said. “From the mobility engineers’ standpoint, this drive was geared to testing out how we do drives on this new surface.” Gathering new information such as how much the wheels slip in the martian soil will give the team confidence for more ambitious drives in future weeks and months.

“Adirondack is now about one foot (30 centimeters) in front of the front wheels,” he said.

Scientists chose Adirondack to be Spirit’s first target rock rather than another rock, called Sashimi, that would have been a shorter, straight-ahead drive. Rocks are time capsules containing evidence of the environmental conditions of the past, said Dr. Dave Des Marais, a rover science-team member from NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “We needed to decide which of these time capsules to open.”

Sashimi appears dustier than Adirondack. The dust layer could obscure good observations of the rock’s surface, which may give information about chemical changes and other weathering from environmental conditions affecting the rock since its surface was fresh. Also, Sashimi is more pitted than Adirondack. That makes it a poorer candidate for the rover’s rock abrasion tool, which scrapes away a rock’s surface for a view of the interior evidence about environmental conditions when the rock first formed. Adirondack has a “nice, flat surface” well suited to trying out the rover’s tools on their first martian rock, Des Marais said.

“The hypothesis is that this is a volcanic rock, but we’ll test that hypothesis,” 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.

Spirit’s twin Mars Exploration Rover, 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.

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.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Image credit: ESA

Even though it hasn’t reached its final operating orbit, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express has delivered some amazing images of the surface of Mars. This featured image shows a portion of the Martian Grand Canyon, called Valles Marineris, from two perspectives. It’s the first image to show the surface of Mars with such high resolution, in colour, and in 3D. Although it has so far failed to make contact with Beagle 2, the spacecraft will have several more opportunities when the lander goes into a special communications mode where it attempts to communicate constantly throughout the Martian day.

ESA’s Mars Express, successfully inserted into orbit around Mars on 25 December 2003, is about to reach its final operating orbit above the poles of the Red Planet. The scientific investigation has just started and the first results already look very promising, as this first close-up image shows.

Although the seven scientific instruments on board Mars Express are still undergoing a thorough calibration phase, they have already started collecting amazing results. The first high-resolution images and spectra of Mars have already been acquired.

This first spectacular stereoscopic colour picture was taken on 14 January 2004 by ESA?s Mars Express satellite from 275 km above the surface of Mars by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). This image is available on the ESA Portal at: http://mars.esa.int

The picture shows a portion of a 1700 km long and 65 km wide swath which was taken in south-north direction across the Grand Canyon of Mars (Valles Marineris). It is the first image of this size that shows the surface of Mars in high resolution (12 metres per pixel), in colour, and in 3D. The total area of the image on the Martian surface (top left corner) corresponds to 120 000 km?. The lower part of the picture shows the same region in perspective view as if seen from a low-flying aircraft. This perspective view was generated on a computer from the original image data. One looks at a landscape which has been predominantly shaped by the erosional action of water. Millions of cubic kilometres of rock have been removed, and the surface features seen now such as mountain ranges, valleys, and mesas, have been formed.

The HRSC is just one of the instruments to have collected exciting data. To learn more about the very promising beginning to ESA’s scientific exploration of Mars, media representatives are invited to attend a press conference on Friday, 23 January 2004, at 11:00 CET at ESA?s Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, and in video-conference with the other ESA centres.

There, under the auspices of ESA Council Chair, Germany’s Minister for Education and Research, Mrs Edelgard Bulmahn, ESA’s Director of the Scientific Programme, Prof. David Southwood and the Principal Investigators of all instruments on board Mars Express will present the first data and preliminary results.

Also a spectacular, three-dimensional video sequence, featuring famous landmarks on the surface of Mars ‘as seen through European eyes’ will be unveiled for the first time on Friday 23 January .

Original Source: ESA News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL

NASA’s Spirit rover reached out and examined the Martian soil with its microscope instrument at the end of its robotic arm; this is the first microscopic image ever taken of another planet. The microscope can reveal objects as small as the width of a human hair, and will help scientists look at the fine details of rock to learn if they were formed by standing water. The rover will examine the same area with two other instruments: the M?ssbauer Spectrometer to find iron-bearing minerals, and the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer which identifies the elements in rocks and soils.

NASA’s Spirit rover reached out with its versatile robotic arm early today and examined a patch of fine-grained martian soil with a microscope at the end of the arm.

“We made our first use of the arm and took the first microscopic image of the surface of another planet,” said Dr. Mark Adler, Spirit mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The rover’s microscopic imager, one of four tools on a turret at the end of the arm, serves as the functional equivalent of a field geologist’s hand lens for examining structural details of rocks and soils.

“I’m elated and relieved at how well things are going. We got some great images in our first day of using the microscopic imager on Mars,” said Dr. Ken Herkenhoff of the U.S. Geological Survey Astrogeology Team, Flagstaff, Ariz. Herkenhoff is the lead scientist for the microscopic imagers on Spirit and on Spirit’s twin Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity.

The microscope can show features as small as the width of a human hair. While analysis of today’s images from the instrument has barely begun, Herkenhoff said his first impression is that some of the tiny particles appear to be stuck together.

Before driving to a selected rock early next week, Spirit will rotate the turret of tools to use two spectrometer instruments this weekend on the same patch of soil examined by the microsope, said Jessica Collisson, mission flight director. The M?ssbauer Spectrometer identifies types of iron-bearing minerals. The Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer identifies the elements in rocks and soils.

The rover’s arm is about the same size as a human arm, with comparable shoulder, elbow and wrist joints. It is “one of the most dextrous and capable robotic devices ever flown in space,” said JPL’s Dr. Eric Baumgartner, lead engineer for the robotic arm, which also goes by the name “instrument deployment device.”

“Best of all,” Baumgartner said, “this robotic arm sits on a rover, and a rover is meant to rove. Spirit will take this arm and the tremendous science package along with it, and reach out to investigate the surface.”

The wheels Spirit travels on provide other ways to examine Mars’ soil. Details visible in images of the wheel tracks from the rover’s first drive onto the soil give information about the soil’s physical properties.

“Rover tracks are great,” said Dr. Rob Sullivan of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., a member of the science team for Spirit and Opportunity. “For one thing, they mean we’re on the surface of Mars! We look at them for engineering reasons and for science reasons.” The first tracks show that the wheels did not sink too deep for driving and that the soil has very small particles that provide a finely detailed imprint of the wheels, he said.

Opportunity, equipped identically to Spirit, will arrive at Mars Jan. 25 (Universal Time and EST; 9:05 p.m. Jan. 24, PST). The amount of dust in the atmosphere over Opportunity’s planned landing site has been declining in recent days, said JPL’s Dr. Joy Crisp, project scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover Project.

Today, Spirit completes its 13th martian day, or “sol”, at its landing site in Gusev Crater. Each sol lasts 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than an Earth day. The rover project’s goal is for Spirit and Opportunity to explore the areas around their landing sites for clues in the rocks and the soil about whether the past environments there were ever watery and possibly suitable for sustaining life.

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. Pictures 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.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release