Mars Rovers Mission Enlightening
NASA’s Opportunity Rover discovered high concentrations of dissolved minerals in the wet, early Mars environment which may have hindered any microbes from developing or surviving. Beginning their fifth year on Mars in January 2008, Opportunity and it’s twin, Spirit have exceeded their prime missions of three months. Recently, scientists and engineers discussed new observations by the rovers, recent analysis of some earlier discoveries, and perspectives on which lessons from these rovers’ success’s pertain to upcoming missions to Mars.
These items were introduced at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. “The engineering efforts that have enabled the rovers’ longevity have tremendously magnified the science return,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca NY principal investigator for the rovers’ science payload. “All of Spirit’s most important findings, such as evidence for hot springs or steam vents, came after the prime mission.”
Scientists had speculated that a bright band of rocks around the inner wall of a crater might shield a record of the ground surface from just before the impact that excavated the crater. Opportunity had spent several months examining the area but inspection showed that it was at the top of an underground water table, Squyres reported. Simulated Martian conditions and computer modeling are a part of experiments helping researches refining earlier evaluations of whether the ancient conditions in the Meridians’ area studied by Opportunity would have been hospitable to microbes. It doesn’t look feasible. “At first, we focused on acidity, because the environment would have been very acidic,” Knoll said. “Now, we also appreciate the high salinety of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life. ”
Conditions may have been more hospitable earlier, with water less briny, but later conditions at Meridian’s and elsewhere on the surface of Mars appears to have been less hospitable,’ Knoll said. “Life at the Martian surface would have been very challenging for the last four billion years. The best hopes for a story of life on Mars are at environments we haven’t studied yet - older ones, subsurface ones,” he said. NASA’s current rovers and orbiters at Mars are carrying out the agency’s “follow the water” theme for Mars exploration. They unravel the fate and roles of Mars whose major difference from Earth is the lack of water.
According to Charles Elachi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena CA ; achievements of Spirit and Opportunity include working 16 times longer than planned, driven 20 times farther than planned, and most important, found diverse geological records of the effects of water in ancient Martian environments. Elachi said, “Fifty years into the Space Age, we are still in the golden age of robotic exploration of our solar system. Each mission presents new challenges.”
This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 8:58 am and is filed under Mission History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
