Mars rover closes in on biggest crater yet

Spirit: Making it through winter
On the other side of Mars, within Gusev crater, sister robot Spirit is devotedly engaged in gathering science data, too. It’s in need of a little dental work, however.

The robot’s grinding teeth have worn away on its arm-mounted rock abrasion tool — but only after exposing interiors of five times more rock targets than its design goal of three rocks. The tool still has useful wire bristles for brushing targets.

“Spirit has been very busy lately, taking an enormous panorama that we call the McMurdo Pan,” Squyres reported. The robot is doing lots of work with its robot arm.

Spirit has been positioned in such a way that its solar panels can help the machine endure several months of Martian winter.

The power on Spirit is good, Squyres noted. Projections of the rover’s overall health, he said, suggest the robot will make it through the Martian winter and be able to keep doing science the whole time.

“One thing about staying in one place for a long time is that it enables lots of interesting science that just isn’t possible when you’re always moving. We’re taking advantage of that now with Spirit,” Squyres explained.

The ‘eyes’ have it
Both Spirit and Opportunity are churning out travelogue-style photos of their respective treks over Mars. The eyes of the robots — their camera systems — are capturing a wide range of scenery along the way.

“All of the cameras continue to work remarkably well and are continuing to acquire beautiful images,” said Cornell astronomer Jim Bell, the panoramic camera payload element lead for the Mars Exploration Rovers. “They have proven to be extremely robust to the extreme conditions on the Martian surface … large temperature swings, fine dust everywhere, large cosmic ray flux,” he told Space.com.

NASA / JPL / Cornell / USGS This image shows a pattern of brushings in the Martian soil, created by the Spirit rover. The brushings are analyzed to shed light on soil composition.

Since the twin rovers independently landed on Mars in January 2004, Spirit’s cameras have taken about 82,000 pictures. Opportunity has taken about 71,500 pictures, for a combined downlinked image data volume of about 19 gigabytes. About 54,400 of Spirit's images and 49,500 of Opportunity's are high-resolution panoramic images, Bell said.

“At Meridiani, once we get to Victoria Crater in June or July we are obviously looking forward to remarkable views of the interior,” Bell said. The pictures should help identify possible routes to explore even deeper exposures of sedimentary outcrop rocks.

“At Gusev, we are hunkered down for the winter now, obtaining detailed chemical measurements on reachable rocks and soils and acquiring the gigantic 360-degree McMurdo panorama with little or no compression in all [camera] filters from our winter haven parking spot,” Bell said.

Up there on Mars, Bell concluded, “the missions just keep rocking on!”

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