The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Spirit immediately transmitted a range of black and white images, including a sweeping panoramic of the Martian landscape, as well as a bird’s-eye view of the rover with its solar panels fully deployed.

Mission science manager John Callas said:

“This just keeps getting better and better. The pictures are fantastic.”

The total cost of the MER project was £545 million.

When NASA’s first Mars Exploration rover landed on Mars, Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent of The Times reported:

NASA scientists controlling the Spirit rover, which landed on Mars on Sunday, have chosen its first destination: a 10-metre-wide (30ft) crater they have nicknamed “Sleepy Hollow”.

The circular depression, which can be seen clearly in panoramic pictures sent to Earth yesterday, has been singled out as the best place for Spirit to begin its search for evidence that Mars was once wet and habitable. The rover is likely to set off for the crater, named after an American horror story, as soon as it leaves its landing module early next week.

Steve Squyres, the mission’s chief scientist, said the images suggested that a meteor strike had probably created the crater. The impact is likely to have cut through layers of rock, excavating the planetary surface for the rover to explore.

“The science so far has been extremely focused on where to go after the egress,” Dr Squyres said. “It’s a circular depression, 30ft in diameter and about 40ft to 50ft away from the rover.

“It’s a hole in the ground, a window into the interior of Mars. It may have been an impact crater, largely filled with dust. You can see the rock is exposed on the far side.

“It’s a very exciting feature for us. It’s probably where we will go unless we see something better.

“The feature now has a name. We have all not been getting as much sleep as we’d like, so this feature is now named Sleepy Hollow.”

Spirit, which has a daily range of 20m (65ft), will use its rock abrasion tool to grind down the surface of boulders, before testing them with scientific instruments. It aims to establish whether Mars holds sedimentary rocks, which would offer evidence that the planet once flowed with water – a prerequisite for life.

Scientists believe that Gusev Crater, the region in which Spirit landed, might have held an ancient lake, making it a promising site for finding sediments.

Dr Squyres said yesterday that tests on four of the craft’s six key instruments had shown that they had survived Spirit’s hard landing on Mars, in which it bounced up to 14 times before coming to a halt.

His team was relieved that the sensitive Mossbauer spectrometer, which identifies iron isotopes in rocks, was working. Tests on the remaining instruments will begin today. Scientists were hoping last night to receive a colour high-resolution panoramic picture from the rover, which would be by far the best image of Mars ever captured.

Dr Squyres said that they had received 12 thumbnail pictures showing that Spirit had taken the required photographs, which were being stored in the craft’s memory, awaiting the right opportunity to return them to Earth.

“We have acquired the image, the pictures are taken and on board Spirit, ready to be downlinked,” he said.

Earlier, the team successfully deployed the rover’s high-gain antenna and pointed it to Earth, which will allow it to talk directly with mission control.

This will cut communication times to nine minutes, compared with more than an hour when signals are relayed through NASA’s twin orbiters, Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor.

Matt Wallace, deputy surface mission manager, said Spirit had taken pictures of the Sun’s position overhead to point the antenna in the correct direction.

“Just as the ancient mariners used sextants to locate themselves by shooting the Sun, we were successful at shooting the Sun using our pan-cam,” he said. “It’s been another good day on Mars.”

On 16 January 2004, Mark Henderson reported:

NASA’s Spirit rover took its first spin on Mars yesterday, successfully driving the three metres from its landing platform to the planet’s surface. Engineers played “Who Let the Dogs Out?” on the mission control stereo as pictures showing two parallel tracks in the Martian dirt were beamed back to Earth, confirming that the golf-cart-sized robot had completed the most hazardous manoeuvre of its three-month mission.