Photos from the surface of Mars taken by the newly-landed Opportunity rover offer a "Holy Grail" for geologists, leaders of NASA's mission to the Red Planet said on Monday.
In a briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, officials also said they were making progress in diagnosing and fixing the problems that have plagued the Spirit rover, though they said it was too soon to tell if Spirit would ever return to fully normal operations.
PHOTO: AFP
Opportunity, which landed on Mars early Sunday in a small and shallow crater in what scientists called an "interplanetary hole-in-one," has begun the process of shooting a 360-degree image of its landing area using a panoramic camera setup called a "pancam."
In the meantime, scientists said, a "postcard" assembled from photos shot out of the back of the rover are showing significant rock formations.
"We're seeing outcrops ... this is like a Holy Grail for geologists to be able to see these incredible rocks," said Jim Bell, the team's leading camera specialist. "There's a lot more coming and we couldn't be happier, more thrilled, with what we're seeing at this incredible landing site."
Steve Squyres, the principal science investigator for the mission, said the team was already trying to figure out where to head next.
"There are a number of tempting targets, potential craters that we could go to after we crawl out of the one we are in," he said.
Much of Opportunity's landing zone appeared darker in color and draped in fine-grain red and gray soils devoid of the rocks and boulders littering other areas on Mars, and Squyres said his team was still debating the composition.
He also said that, notwithstanding Spirit's troubles, the rovers looked to be outperforming design expectations.
"There is reason to believe we're going to get significantly more than the 90 sols [Martian days] that we originally planned for," he said.
Spirit mission manager Jennifer Trosper said her group was at work trying to get Spirit into shape after putting it into "cripple mode," allowing the rover to ignore the flash memory chips that appear to be at the root of its problems.
The rover, which landed on Mars on Jan. 3, stopped communicating early last week after what managers called a "very serious anomaly" that interrupted the craft's exploration of the Gusev Crater -- an area that scientists believe may be the site of an ancient lake bed.
"Spirit is doing better, kind of like we have a patient in rehab here and we're nursing her back to health," she said. "We're making a lot of progress now that we've actually gotten telemetry from the vehicle."
She said the team may try to access that flash memory tomorrow, where scientific and photographic data is stored, to do a health check. The day after, she said, they may try to delete some files, believing an excess of data in memory may be part of the problem.
"Our current theory is ... software would fix the problem," she said. "We don't know yet whether Spirit will be perfect again."
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