Opportunity lands on Mars and sends images of strange new world
By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
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| Above, one of the Mars rover Opportunity's first breathtaking views of the Martian landscape after its successful landing at Meridiani Planum on Sunday morning, It shows an outcropping of rock, the first bedrock seen in any Mars landing so far. On the left, the rover's mast can be seen in a stowed position. The image was taken by the rover's navigation camera. Below, the first panoramic camera color image, processed by the MarsLab at Cornell, shows that the soil is gray on the surface but becomes red where it was disturbed by the rover's airbags. Click on the images for higher-resolution versions (navcam: 512 x 512 pixels, 188K, Pancam: 2319 x2915 pixels, 4MB) |
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After safely bouncing down at Meridiani Planum at 9:05 p.m. Pacific time Saturday (12:05 a.m. Eastern time Sunday), Opportunity, the second rover to land on Mars in three weeks, retracted its airbags, unfurled its petals, and within an hour sent pictures of a strange landscape unlike anything ever seen before.
"I'm blown away. It's a beautiful, alien place," said Steven Squyres, Cornell professor of astronomy and the mission's principal scientific investigator. Speaking at a 2 a.m., Pacific time, at a standing-room-only press conference, he said, "This is exactly what I thought it looked like in my wildest dreams."
Showing Opportunity's first black-and-white images to the large press corps at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the mission's manager, Squyres explained that the Martian soil is like nothing he has seen. So far, this is the darkest soil ever found on Mars and the image showed the first outcrop of bedrock ever discovered on the red planet.
Bedrock provides geologists with a history of the nearby area, possibly indicating, for example, if water was ever present.
Fifteen minutes into the press conference, Jim Bell, Cornell associate professor of astronomy who leads of the panoramic camera, or Pancam, team, presented Opportunity's first color image. It shows a predominantly gray-tinted soil that turned bright red when stirred, as evidenced by the marks left behind by the retracting airbags. "Look, gray goes red when its touched," he said.
In fact, the image showed soil imprints -- an inverse impression made by the airbags -- so sharp, that Squyres noted the detail of an airbag's seam.
The images were processed at the MarsLab in Cornell's Space Sciences Building. The raw images arrived at Cornell at 1:15 a.m. Pacific time and were processed by Eldar Noe, Rich Chomko, Jason Soderblom and Jonathan Joseph. The images were calibrated, color-balanced in Ithaca, then delivered electronically to the press conference by 2 a.m. Pacific time.
Mission controllers at JPL celebrated the safe landing with whoops and cries of joy, as scientists and engineers shook hands with visitors California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Vice President Al Gore. Schwarzenegger made a special stop to congratulate Squyres.
Opportunity is the identical twin to Spirit, the rover that bounced down on the Gusev crater, on the opposite side of Mars, on Jan. 3. On Wednesday, Spirit developed serious communications problems, waiving off NASA's commands and refusing to be put into sleep mode. On Saturday, Pete Theisinger, NASA mission manager, reported good news for the sick rover and upgraded its condition from critical to serious. He reported that the rover's flash memory (the same type of memory that retains images in digital cameras) had been corrupted. Engineers, he said, had disengaged the flash memory, rebooted the system using random access memory and established communication. For the first time in four days, Spirit slept through the night.
There are more details on Spirit in the latest JPL press release.
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