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Mars rovers awaken from winter slumber |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Thursday, 28 August 2008
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 Having successfully survived another southern hemisphere Martian winter, the solar-powered Mars rovers are back at work, with Opportunity again stealing the spotlight. Having rolled down into Victoria Crater nearly a year ago, NASA mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, have accomplished everything they set out to do when they went into the crater, and are now taking the same route back out. Their efforts could be stymied by a potential wheel failure, though - Opportunity experienced an unsettling power spike in its left front wheel motor, a similar electrical current spike spelled doom for the right front wheel of the rover’s twin Spirit in 2006.
Since the failure of the wheel put Spirit down to five wheels, mission control has taken to driving the rover backwards and dragging the stuck wheel across Mars. If Opportunity were to experience such a failure on its way up out of Victoria Crater, it very well not make it out of the crater. Like Spirit, if the wheel were to fail on level ground, the Opportunity would be able to carry on, but the rover will need all six of its wheels operational if it is to stand any chance of climbing up the side of Victoria Crater.
On its way out, Opportunity took the, well, opportunity to take some detailed images of a 6 meter (20 foot) tall outcropping of layered rock named “Cape Verde.” The rover also used its rock abrasion tool to look at the unaltered rock below; data collected suggests that the wind-blown sediments that eventually created the sedimentary rocks experienced the influence of ancient groundwater. Cape Verde and the other rock layers in Victoria Crater were exposed by a massive impact that left an 800 meter (half mile) wide hole in Mars’ surface, one deeper than any other encountered by either rovers.
The twin rovers landed on Mars back in January 2004 and were originally slated for a 90-day mission. Both are still operational, but have suffered glitches and equipment failures in the 55 months they’ve been exploring the Martian surface. Opportunity is driving with its robotic arm out of its storage bay, in case an aging shoulder motor dies and prevents the arm from being unstowed. Apart from the broken wheel motor, Spirit’s rock abrasion tool, used to scrape away the weather outside of rocks, has been worn away to the point that it can only be used to brush dust off of targets.
Both rovers have also weathered a planet-wide dust storm that threatened to permanently them shut down by drastically reducing the amount of light their solar panels received. Paradoxically, the winds from the dust storm actually blew off much of the dust that had accumulated on the rovers’ solar panels, allowing them to generate power a higher levels than before the storm.
For its part, Spirit has awakened from winter hibernation, but its position further south has it receiving less sunlight than Opportunity, preventing it from moving out of its current safe haven for the next few months. In the meantime, Spirit is continuing to assemble a full-circle high-resolution color panorama from the edge of the “Home Plate” plateau on which it is perched. Once Spirit’s power reserves have been replenished, NASA will direct it to a nearby patch of bright silica-rich soil the rover encountered last year; the silica content is indicative of past contact with hot water.
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