NASA’s Rover Touches Down Safely on Mars

NASA’s Spirit rover survived its fiery plunge through the thin Martian atmosphere Saturday evening, bouncing across the planet’s red landscape to a jarring but safe landing at Gusev Crater. Within hours, the rover began transmitting its first images of Mars, a series of stunning views of the area around the lander.

The high-definition camera provided a series of panoramic views of the crater, showing rocks and terrain in astounding clarity. One dramatic photo showed a boulder scant yards from the lander, indicating how close it had come to disaster. Another showed a panoramic scan of the area surrounding Spirit.

The first data package also included lower-quality pictures taken by the descent camera as the rover neared the surface.

The images capped a day of celebration for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which designed and built the rover.

Cheers and clapping had erupted in the JPL control room earlier as mission control announced that NASA’s Goldstone antenna in the Mojave Desert had acquired “a very strong signal from the rover’s low-gain antenna” at 8:51 p.m.

Scientists and engineers in the control room who had been visibly tense during the craft’s descent hugged one another and shook hands all around as it became clear that Spirit had made a near-perfect landing.

“This is a big night for NASA,” said NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe shortly after the landing. “We’re back. I’m very, very proud of this team that we are on Mars.” He then poured champagne for the team leaders.

The safe arrival, the first since NASA’s Mars Pathfinder reached the Red Planet on July 4, 1997, marks a major step forward in NASA’s search for signs of life on Earth’s closest neighbor.

Spirit will spend at least the next three months searching for evidence that water once was common on the surface of Mars, a prerequisite for the existence of life.

Launched on June 10 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the craft traveled more than 300 million miles for its historic rendezvous.

Against the odds, Spirit landed in an upright position, allowing immediate communications with Earth.

“We’ve got many more steps to go before this mission is completely over, but we’ve retired a lot of risk at this time,” said Peter Theisinger, the rover project manager.

Two minutes after the signal was acquired, the 384-pound lander began collapsing its air bag so that it could unfold the petals of its pyramid-shaped capsule and begin deploying its solar panels to recharge its batteries.

After raising its camera and antenna mast, Spirit transmitted its first batch of data and pictures to the Mars Odyssey orbiter as it passed over the landing site about 11 p.m. Odyssey relayed them to Earth a few minutes later.

The team got its first hint of impending success at 8:35 p.m., when Goldstone received a brief signal that the rover was bouncing across the surface, indicating that the craft had made it through the most difficult phase of the descent.

But the team immediately lost the signal as the rover’s small antenna gyrated wildly while the craft rolled to a stop.

Controllers waited anxiously for several tense minutes until the signal was reacquired.

When the signal finally came, all the worries of the last four years of work seemed to evaporate in a puff of elation.

“This is the most important first step.... We’ve done very well,” said JPL’s Matt Golombek, laughing for joy. “We’re happy folk.”

Spirit will spend the next nine days checking out its internal systems, charging its batteries, and photographing the site before it finally rolls off its landing platform and begins its geological work.

Spirit is the most ambitious effort yet to roam the surface of another planet. It is part of a small fleet of spacecraft sent toward Mars in an effort to answer one of the most captivating questions in science: Has there been life on other planets?

Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, are the most sophisticated of the spacecraft, and hopes are high that they will provide a bounty of information.

The stakes were even higher because NASA’s last two Mars missions, the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander, failed in 1999. A third mission planned for 2001 was canceled when outside reviewers concluded the agency was attempting too much with too few resources.

The two new missions, costing $820 million together, have consumed the energy of hundreds of scientists and engineers for the last four years and destroyed the recent holidays for mission controllers.

Reporters were camped out in JPL’s newsroom waiting for the fateful moment of arrival and hundreds of thousands of people were watching on the Internet.

Earlier Saturday, the JPL campus exuded more excitement than anxiety as four years of intensive efforts were perched on the knife edge between success and disaster.

Small knots of employees joked and talked in the bright sunshine of the lab’s central campus; even top mission managers seemed upbeat and relaxed.

That almost preternatural sense of calm was described by JPL Director Charles Elachi as essential to the mission’s success.

“We are nervous,” he said. “But when you feel you have done your best, you’ve done everything possible, then it’s important to be calm -- because there may be decisions and judgments to make.”

All the years of preparation paid off.

A planned last-minute course correction proved unnecessary because the craft was already on a “bull’s-eye” course for its targeted landing site in Gusev Crater.

“This is essentially perfect navigation,” said JPL’s navigation team chief, Louis D’Amario. “We couldn’t possibly have hoped to do better than this.”

But the team did have to make some last-minute adjustments in the landing program to take into account a dust storm on the opposite side of Mars.

Because dust absorbs more sunlight than the planet’s surface, Mars’ upper atmosphere was about 10% to 15% warmer and thinner than normal, said mission manager Mark Adler.

The lander’s parachute was therefore reprogrammed to open 13 or 14 seconds earlier than originally planned to ensure that the craft didn’t crash into the surface, he said.

JPL’s scientists and engineers were confident that they had done everything they could to prepare for Spirit’s landing -- a harrowing maneuver that Theisinger described as the riskiest part of the mission.

Mission controllers call the entry “six minutes from hell” because the spacecraft’s speed had to be reduced from 12,000 mph to effectively zero. The craft relied on a parachute and retrorockets to slow its descent before bouncing to a halt on its cocoon of air bags.

The whole process had to be handled autonomously by Spirit’s on-board computer. Earthbound controllers could only sit back and watch. And worry.

“It was six minutes from hell, but in this case we said the right prayers and we got up to heaven,” said Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for space science.

Spirit’s successful landing gives a boost to the spirits of planetary scientists, who have recently witnessed more failures than successes with Mars missions.

Last month, Japan conceded that its Nozomi orbiter had failed because of navigational and equipment problems. Its mission was aborted.

The fate of Britain’s Beagle 2 lander, carried to Mars aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter, is still in doubt.

Beagle 2 was scheduled to land in the Isidis Planitia basin late Christmas Eve Pacific time, but controllers have not been able to make contact with the craft and many fear it is lost.

Mars Express did go into orbit, however, and controllers have been altering its path so that it can attempt to make contact with Beagle. They are scheduled to begin those efforts today.

NASA’s two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were launched last year to take advantage of Mars’ closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years, a celestial alignment that brought it within 35 million miles of Earth.

The armada marks the beginning of humanity’s strongest effort yet to determine whether life has ever existed on Mars.