The roving Mars probe named Spirit began beaming photos of its windswept landing site back to Earth on Sunday, marking a dramatic and precious success for the American space program after a string of high-profile failures.
Over the next few months the 384-pound rover is expected to travel far and wide over the Martian surface and send back the highest-resolution photos ever from the surface of another planet–a mission that NASA planners hope will boost public excitement and political support for space exploration.
NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe portrayed the near-perfect landing as at least a partial vindication of the space agency’s competence, after the failure of two American Mars probes in 1999 and the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven-person crew nearly one year ago.
“We’re back,” an exultant O’Keefe said in a press briefing after the rover touched down late Saturday.
Agency scientists were jubilant Sunday as they pondered interesting places to visit in the rover’s surroundings–a place called Gusev Crater that experts believe contains an ancient lakebed. Initial black-and-white photos showed hills in the distance and a rocky surface scoured by towering dust devils.
“It’s perfect,” Steven Squyres, principal investigator for the Mars rover, said of the landing site in an interview. “This is an area that has been swept clean for us by Mother Nature, and that’s good news.”
Spirit will be scouting rocks and minerals for signs that Mars once had surface water and conditions where life might have thrived. In case some dust remains on the rocks, the rover carries a drilling tool, which can expose a cleaner surface for the vehicle’s microscope and chemical analysis instruments.
Although the first images Sunday were grainy black-and-white photos, mission leaders hope for high-resolution color images from the probe’s main digital cameras sometime Monday.
Squyres said he won’t consider the mission a success until about a week from now, when the six-wheeled rover is slated to roll off its base and begin roaming the Martian soil. The probe can move 120 feet a day, and is expected to rove half a mile or more over its planned three-month mission. A twin rover named Opportunity is headed for a Mars landing later this month.
Mars has been an elusive destination for unmanned probes–roughly two-thirds of all missions to the planet have ended in failure. Not one of the 16 Mars probes that Russia and the former Soviet Union launched between 1960 and 1996 achieved its mission.
The latest international effort was the Beagle 2, a British-designed probe that has not been heard from since its arrival at Mars on Christmas Day. Investigators for that mission passed congratulations to the American team Sunday, while saying they still hope to make contact with the Beagle 2.
Spirit’s potentially groundbreaking mission comes at a crucial time for NASA, which saw morale plummet after last February’s Columbia accident and an official report that laid much of the blame for the mishap on the shuttle program’s flawed safety culture.
Adding to the pressure, the Bush administration is contemplating a grand vision for space exploration that some experts say could include a call for sending astronauts to Mars. Any failure of the $800 million unmanned Mars rovers could hurt the prospects for more ambitious plans.
So it was a cathartic moment late Saturday when NASA chief O’Keefe gave a champagne toast to the successful rover team members, many of whom took part in the failed 1999 Mars missions. At one point, O’Keefe alluded directly to the criticism the Columbia accident board made of NASA in its final report last August.
“To those who believe this is not a learning organization, this is proof positive today that it is,” O’Keefe said.
He seemed to be rebutting a criticism the Columbia board made when it wrote, “NASA’s current organization … has not demonstrated the characteristics of a learning organization.”
In the audience during O’Keefe’s remarks was John Logsdon, a member of the accident board that wrote that assessment.
Logsdon said that unlike the shuttle program before the Columbia accident, it appeared the Mars exploration program had learned from its past mistakes. He also said he “understood where [O’Keefe] was coming from.”
“I think he was badly stung by the board’s criticism,” said Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “He wants to demonstrate that the organization is better than we described it in our critique.”
The Mars rovers could mark a turning point for NASA, Logsdon said.
“This will boost the morale of the whole organization and clear the way for the president to announce a new vision for the program,” Logsdon said. “This was a really good day for NASA. They deserve every bit of credit that people can give them for this accomplishment, because it all worked so much better than anyone anticipated.”
The rover landing was so accurate that mission officials said the probe hit the Martian atmosphere within about 600 feet of where they had planned. The team was still calculating precisely where the rover came to rest after an airbag-cushioned landing, but estimated that the rover was within 6 miles of its intended target–a feat one team member compared to teeing off from Los Angeles and making a birdie in New York.
Squyres, the science team leader, credited the mission’s successful landing in part to “fundamental changes” the Mars program implemented after the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in 1999. One of those vehicles was lost because of a basic error in converting metric units; the other switched off its landing jets too soon and crashed.
Although the possible loss of the Beagle 2 mission recalled those earlier failures, Squyres said the British team’s difficulties did not raise his anxiety.
“It really comes down to whether you trust the hardware you’ve built,” Squyres said. “I had a lot of confidence in this vehicle.”
