Sticking one of its eyes to the Martian ground, the NASA rover Opportunity has found a mix of particles, from fine soil to sand grains to almost perfectly round pebbles.
"There are features in this soil unlike anything that has been seen on Mars before," said Steven Squyres, a professor of astronomy at Cornell and the principal investigator for the two rovers now on Mars.
PHOTO: EPA
It is too early to say why some of the pebbles are round, what the mix of particles means or whether the new information fits with the theory that Mars was once warm and wet, Squyres and other scientists said Wednesday at a news conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"If you've gotten the sense that we don't quite know what these things are yet," Squyres said, "you've got it right."
Meanwhile, hoping finally to squash the programming bug that has troubled the other rover, the Spirit, for the last two weeks, mission controllers yesterday erased and reinitialized its flash memory, used for the long-term storage of data.
The four-hour procedure was the equivalent of reformatting a corrupted hard disk in a personal computer.
The Spirit's computer started crashing on Jan. 21, and engineers traced the problem to the software that reads and writes information to and from flash memory. Last Friday, flight controllers were able to gain control over the computer by erasing some files, and the Spirit resumed limited scientific work.
The rover encountered a bit more trouble on Tuesday when an operation to locate the position of the sun in sky -- and thus the rover's orientation -- failed.
A corrupted file in flash memory may have caused the problem, said Mark Adler, one of the mission's managers. The managers said they would reformat the Spirit's flash memory last weekend, but then decided to spend a few more days making sure they would not inadvertently disable the rover.
"This is an operation you don't do willy-nilly," Adler said.
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