The NASA Spirit rover is on Mars and transmitting back pictures.
Engineers believed Spirit landed smack in the middle of Gusev Crater, a Connecticut-sized basin just south of the martian equator. It should take scientists three or four days to pinpoint exactly where it alighted, said Steve Squyres, the mission’s main scientist.
After landing, Spirit took about 90 minutes to set up and go to work, retracting its air bags and deploying its solar arrays.
The first photographs showed a flat, wind-swept plain peppered with rocks. Also visible were portions of the rover itself, including a tiny sundial it carried to Mars.
The new images were the first from the surface of Mars since NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997. The first color images were expected late Sunday.
Excellent.
Here’s the image gallery for the mission.
Hey, it looks different than the old “Mission to Mars” at Disneyland! You remember, it replaced “Flight to the Moon.” (Man, those were the days!)
Well, it doesn’t much look like Bradbury’s Mars, either. Or Burroughs. Not sure if that’s a bad thing or a good thing …
I was personally hoping for Clarke’s “Sands of Mars”!
Anybody ever read “Mars and the Mind of Men”? It was edited by Bradbury and Clarke, and was a transcript (along with essays) of a meeting before the arrival of Mariner 9.
Both Clarke and Bradbury were hoping for crowds of Martians waving signs, saying (respectively) “Clarke Was Right!” and “Bradbury Was Right!”.
Okay, well, in that case, I’d have still rooted for the “Burroughs Was Right!” contingent.