The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Mission control had said that it could take 22 hours for Opportunity to make contact with Earth following its scheduled arrival at 5.05 am, but the rover sent signals within moments of landing. Scientists cheered, and were congratulated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, and former Vice President Al Gore, who joined the vigil at the laboratory.

Sean O’Keefe, the NASA administrator, saluted his team for landing both rovers successfully, and for beating the “Mars jinx under which two thirds of all missions to the planet have failed. What a night,” he said as he broke open champagne for a second time in three weeks. “No one dared hope that both rover landings would be so successful.”

While Spirit landed on the base petal of its protective pyramidal shell, Opportunity landed on a side petal and had to be flipped into an upright position.

All the airbags that cushioned it on landing appear to have been successfully retracted. One of Spirit’s airbags refused to deflate properly forcing engineers to turn the rover 120 degrees before it could be driven away from the landing module.

British scientists will today begin one of their final attempts to find their missing Beagle 2 lander. The team has not tried to contact the probe for almost two weeks to try to force it into an emergency transmission mode.

On 27 January 2004, Mark Henderson reported in The Times:

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has landed in a small crater, to the delight of scientists who hope that it will provide a ready made window into the planet’s geological past.

The shallow crater, about 65ft across, was formed by a meteor impact, which has performed natural excavation work allowing the rover to peer below the Martian surface without having to dig.

Steve Squyres of Cornell University, lead scientist for the Mars rovers, said that the crater was ideal: big enough to be of great scientific interest but not so deep that the six wheeled robot would be stranded. “We have scored a 300 million mile interplanetary hole in one,” he said. The rover will spend at least a week unfolding itself before leaving its landing module.

British scientists have begun a post-mortem examination into the failure of Beagle 2. Colin Pillinger, the mission’s chief scientist, said yesterday that his team accepted the probable loss.

Direct evidence that Mars was once awash with liquid water has been discovered for the first time, proving that life could once have existed on the planet and may still be there.

NASA scientists announced last night that the Opportunity rover had determined that the rocks of its Meridiani Planum landing site had been soaked in liquid water, the prerequisite of life on Earth.

The startling findings show unequivocally that at least part of the Red Planet has been wet and habitable in the past, with conditions suitable for living organisms to evolve and survive.

Steve Squyres, chief scientist for NASA’s rover mission, said that while the discovery does not prove that life had ever existed on Mars, it shows beyond doubt that it is a real possibility.

“The purpose of going to Mars was to see whether or not it was a habitable environment,” he said. “We believe that this place, in Meridiani Planum, at some point in time was habitable. That doesn’t mean life was there, but it is a place that was habitable at one time.”

James Garvin, NASA’s lead scientist for Mars exploration, said, “NASA launched the Mars Exploration Rover mission specifically to check whether at least one part of Mars ever had a persistently wet environment that could possibly have been hospitable to life. Today we have strong evidence for an exciting answer – ‘yes’.”

Observations from orbit, most recently from the European Mars Express spacecraft, have shown that frozen water exists at the Red Planet’s poles. Probes have also photographed geological features such as canyons and dried-up beds that appear to have been carved by rivers, oceans and lakes.

Water, however, must exist in its liquid form to sustain life, and no direct evidence of this had been found before Opportunity’s investigations.

The conclusion that the rocks of Meridiani Planum, where Opportunity landed on January 25, were once underwater follows three weeks of meticulous experiments. “We’ve been attacking it with every piece of our hardware and the puzzle pieces have been falling into place,” Dr Squyres said.

Four separate pieces of evidence have combined to build a compelling picture. The alpha particle X-ray spectrometer has found high concentrations of sulphate salts, which have to be dissolved in water to accumulate. The Mossbauer spectrometer has also found a mineral called jarosite, which is formed in the presence of water.