OK, I didn't find the time to flesh out the update much more but for those of you not following things closely, this should bring you up to speed from where we were before the holidays.
As Spirit slips and slides, traveling up "Husband Hill," the rover encountered the first of a new type of rock, (they named it "Wishbone,") one that looks nothing like those from lower in the hills and down on the plains. These rocks are rich in phosphorus and dappled with plagioclase. After lots of observation with pretty much all of the science payload onboard, and after dislodging the potato-sized hitchhiker that was riding along inside Spirit's wheel, the rover celebrated one year on Mars with more remote sensing.
A few days later, the engineering team was able to confim the existence of a short in the power bus on the return side of the rover arm that's been suspected since about October. This doesn't currently impact the rover activities but could prove problematic if there was another short on the chasis.
Spirit's main challenge right now is driving up this fairly steep and sandy hill. The rover was experiencing major slippage and digging in over the last month but it sounds like the engineers have devised a new system of driving to counter much of this problem and the drives of the last few days have been much more productive.
Opportunity approaches its one year anniversary on Mars, in a way, back where it started, next to the heat shield that protected Opportunity as it flamed into the Martian atmosphere. After several days of examining the heat shield and debris field, weathering a dust storm that limited battery charging, racking up more than 1.3 miles on the Odometer, experiencing another flash problem (this time from a bad command) and discovering a very interesting rock dubbed "Heat Shield Rock," Opportunity is a healthy rover.
There's not much more one could ask for than that :-)
Posted by asa at January 16, 2005 10:51 PMThe quality of these images never stops shocking me, especially after watching the Huygens shots. ;-) However, Susan has some improved images on 2020 Hindsight now, which are worth a look. I think better than what ESA has released so far at least. A bit annoying that their images weren't higher quality, it only makes you want to immediately have another probe land that's far better equipped. :-D
I guess that's the charm of space science though...
OK, that looks really cool, now we need more information! :-)
