SPIRITS SOAR

The rover Spirit, completing work atop the ridgeline of a Martian mountain 50 million mi. from Earth, epitomizes the extraordinary exploration continuing on Mars by both Spirit and Opportunity. (See the link below to view an enlarged version of the image as PDF.)

The human/robotic rover team is redefining the already formidable performance envelope of the $800-million vehicles, says Steve Squyres of Cornell University, the project's principal investigator. Both Spirit and Opportunity are being pushed to more complex robotic science and driving operations against increasingly challenging terrain.

"We're doing things now that we never would have dreamed of before. The rover planning sequences and drives are far more complex," he says. "We built these things to explore, not to baby. Nearly two years after landing, we are getting better and better science. This has become the most rewarding and fun phase of the entire mission."

This Aviation Week & Space Technology editor recently participated with Squyres and the rover Athena Science Team here at Cornell University as they coordinated rover operations using a distributed virtual planning and command structure.

The setup links investigators in the U.S. and Europe with the key rover planning and command nodes at Cornell and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Cornell and other members of the distributed net are in continuous verbal and video-telecon communication with the JPL engineering team; all see the same transmission of software planning displays, imagery and graphics.

As Science Operations Working Group (SOWG) chairman--the "tactical lead" for the Spirit science team during the period--Squyres led coordination of the final mountaintop campaign and some of the most ambitious operations undertaken with either rover.

My visit, by luck, fell within what Squyres describes as "10 days of high drama on Mars." It more broadly involved rigorous Cornell/JPL planning of seven sols (Martian days) of primary and backup summit operations for Spirit.

This included JPL rover drivers maneuvering the 400-lb. vehicle under a difficult-to-reach bedrock outcrop named "Hillary"--after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to reach the summit of Mt. Everest in 1953 with his Sherpa partner, Tenzing Norgay.

Among the images taken at the summit is a stunning mosaic of monochromatic rover Navcam images, colorized by outside analysts using JPL/Cornell Pancam Imagery (see www. aviationnow.com). This melding of Navcam and Pancam data is artistically stunning, while not fully scientifically calibrated, says Doug Ellison of Leicester, England, who helped lead the work. It reveals Spirit, amazingly free of dust, sitting atop the rounded crest of the mountain, with views down the slopes to the Gusev crater floor below (see cover and pp. 48-49).