Problems Continue to Plague Mars Mission
The Mars Pathfinder lander continues to be plagued by computer problems that have slowed communications with distant Earth to a crawl, even as its tiny robot rover sniffs the chemical composition of the rocks around the landing site.
Glenn Reeves, the flight software engineer who leads the computer experts analyzing the problem at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Tuesday he is confident they can fix a recurring glitch that forces the lander’s computer to reset itself during data transmission sessions with Earth.
So far no data has been lost but the problem, which has been detected three times since Friday, at times has meant that NASA scientists got only one-seventh the data they expected.
“It impacted us severely,” said JPL Pathfinder project scientist Matthew Golombeck.
Nonetheless, Golombeck said, Tuesday “was an excellent day on Mars” as the Pathfinder probe added detail to its emerging scientific portrait of the solar system’s provocative fourth planet.
Sojourner, the six-wheeled rover, spent the day nosing around a Mars rock that mission scientists nicknamed Yogi, using its alpha proton X-ray spectrometer to analyze the rock’s chemistry. Preliminary data suggests that the rock is rich in magnesium. It may be much more primitive and, perhaps, more like Earth than other portions of the Martian landscape.
“This rock does seem more Earthlike than what we would have expected from Martian meteorites,” said University of Tennessee mineralogist James Greenwood, who presented the new data. “Yogi is a more primitive rock. . . . Yogi resembles basalts on Earth.”
NASA mission controllers may order the rover to move away from the rock today--at a speed of a half-inch per second--and start exploring other portions of the crowded rock garden around the Pathfinder lander. It is also expected to stop and spin its wheels today in a test of the soil surface.
In the meantime, mission scientists savored views of the pinkish Martian sunset beamed back from Pathfinder as much for their sheer interplanetary novelty as for the information they conveyed about the state of the atmosphere and the effect of distant dust storms.
“It is staying fairly bright for an hour after sunset, which suggests that the dust is fairly high in the atmosphere,” said University of Arizona imaging expert Mark Lemmon, who is part of the Pathfinder science team.
Other Pathfinder sensors this week transmitted the essence of a Martian weather report--morning fog followed by brisk afternoon winds up to 20 mph, with highs near 7 degrees Fahrenheit and evening lows approaching 100 degrees below zero.
On Tuesday, NASA also released images from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, which has been monitoring the atmosphere around the Pathfinder landing site closely. The images showed the peaks of volcanoes, 16 miles high, poking through areas of thick cloud cover north of the landing site.
University of Colorado astronomer Steven Lee said the Hubble images, taken June 27, showed that the cloud layer must therefore be at an altitude of about nine miles.
