That title was originally going to have a possessive apostrope in it, but I decided to leave it off. Yesterday Steve gave a simply wonderful hourlong overview of the rover mission at a packed plenary session of the AAAS meeting here in DC. It was a straightforward narrative of the two transits to date, taking in the highlights -- nothing new, and no hyped up drama. But it was just so nicely and winningly put together, and it brought home the essential wonder of the undertaking so well, that I felt it needed salute.
A few things that stood out. One is the remarkable ground track of Opportunity's landing -- the way that it took a right angle turn, as far as I could see, on the first bounce so as to trickle down into Eagle crater (I also hadn't fully taken on board the pun in Eagle's name -- Apollo 11 hommage and hole-in-one on a three-par). Another was the clear evidence in the lower levels of Endurance crater that wind-blown dunes underlie the water-borne sediments, very strongly arguing for a marginal environment not a sea: "This is a place that was only wet occasionally". Then there was interesting fact, doubtless fully appreciated by those keeping up with things, that the horizontal boundary between the highly-chemically-altered sediments and the less altered ones originally seen in Eagle crater -- the Whatanga contact -- is not quite parallel to the physical layering in the rock, another indicator that a lot of the water actvity was later on and subsurface, as the chemistry suggests.
Another neat thing was that after seeing a meteorite by the heat shield, they saw what looked like another, complete with a disturbed bit of regolith where it might have landed -- but this rock turned out to be a martian native, which is presumed to have been thrown through the air by an impact.
Also highlighted was the abrupt nature of the geological change at the foot of the Columbia hills. One moment Spirit was surrounded by lava rocks of the sort at the landing site; and then it never saw another of them again. Now it's among rocks that seem ever higher in salt content, in what's either a pyroclastic or impact-generated suite of rocks subsequently thoroughly doused in water.
And with any luck there's more to come. There are bold objectives and a chance to actually get to them. The death of an electronics component is probably now what will finally kill the rovers, and we can't know when that will be -- so the missions have taken on an intriguing mixture of long-term planning and living every day as if it were their last.
But the real wonder was just a year of this remarkable team doing their thing on Mars with the magnificent tools that they worked so hard to build and to get there.
I agree Oliver. Squyre's acumen and clarity in telling of the mission details has made the missions even more compelling and exciting than they already are. I am a guitarist and friend /student of the late John Fahey. My debut album, Xanthe Terra,coming on Strange-Attractors Audiohouse 6/05 is to be dedicated to Steve Squyres and his team.
Posted by: Charles Schmidt | February 19, 2005 at 04:47 PM
Was this recorded, and is there any chance it will appear on the Net at some point?
R
Posted by: Rupert Goodwins | February 22, 2005 at 01:16 AM
Xanthe Terra has been recorded and will be available in June here:
http://www.strange-attractors.com/
If you like the old Takoma school of playing with Fahey and Kottke, you'll love this. Steve Squyres responded by email enthusiastically, asking that the entire project team be included in the dedication which I plan to do.
Posted by: Charles Schmidt | February 22, 2005 at 12:46 PM
Ah, no, I meant was the talk recorded :)
Although I see a fellow Wire subscriber at work. I may well check back.
R
Posted by: Rupert Goodwins | February 22, 2005 at 08:14 PM
December 13, 2004
Mars Rovers Spot Water-Clue Mineral, Frost, Clouds.
"As its last major endeavor inside Endurance Crater, Opportunity made a close inspection of rock layers exposed in a part of the crater wall called "Burns Cliff." Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the rover instruments, said, 'In the lower portion of the cliff, the layers show very strong indications that they were last transported by wind, not by water like some layers higher up. The combination suggests that this was not a deep-water environment but more of a salt flat, alternately wet and dry."
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20041213a.html
If this was an ancient deep water site such as a lake or sea, we would expect the higher levels to reflect water driven layering. But as the water body dried up it would be more due to wind driven erosion.
Bob Clark
Posted by: Robert Clark | March 19, 2005 at 07:19 PM
If I may advertise my own latest article yet again ( http://www.marsdaily.com/news/mars-future-05f.html ), there's a section in it briefly reviewing Steve Squyres' presentation to the first meeting of the Mars Strategic Roadmap Committee on the current status of the MERs' science findings -- and, as he said, we're looking in both places at relatively mild and intermittent exposures of the Martian soil to liquid water. In the case of the Columbia Hills, the groundwater may well never even have risen all the way to the surface at all -- it may even perhaps have existed entirely in the form of condensed steam that had been incorporated into the original volcanic ash. There is no evidence whatsoever in the Columbia Hills pointing toward their being lakebed sediments. In the case of Meridiani, such surface exposures did apparently exist (judging from the fine ripples in the layers), but they seem to have been very intermittent. We now definitely seem to be looking at a Noachian Mars that was cold and damp rather than warm and wet -- and whose water was also laced with substantial amounts of sulfuric acid. All of this continues to leave us seriously uncertain as to whether life could have evolved out of nonliving chemicals on Mars.
There are also some very good abstracts from
the upcoming LPSC and EGU meetings further elaborating on this:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2005/pdf/program.pdf
http://www.cosis.net/members/meetings/programme/session_programme.php?p_id=127&PHPSESSID=6eebc95c8a7ee4ef4ca08b3c1ce29428
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw | March 19, 2005 at 10:43 PM
Happy news, which I saw first on Rick Coffin's useful whatonmars.com site. Steve Squyres has resumed posting his periodic "mission updates" to the Athena Instrument site, http://athena.cornell.edu/. These updates, which Squyres started writing in 1999, form an extremely interesting journal of the mission. They crackle with the same communicable enthusiasm which Squyres displays at his press conferences. The archives are here: http://athena.cornell.edu/news/update_archive.shtml.
Posted by: Tom Tamlyn | April 20, 2005 at 08:04 PM
corrected url for the mission update archives:
http://athena.cornell.edu/news/update_archive.shtml
Posted by: Tom Tamlyn | April 20, 2005 at 08:51 PM
Hi J!We hired a driver from Ayan Travel and did a day trip to the cratres. It's about 4 hours drive from Ashgabat, we arrived at around 6pm and stayed til 8pm, then back to Ashgabat by around 11pm. When you get your transit visa, even if they don't ask you on the app form, make sure you request your entry and exit points. We wanted to exit at Konye Urgench too but didn't request it and were given Farap as the exit point (Turkmenabat Bukhara) which screwed our routing. Luckily we were still able to see the cratres (which were obviously out of our transit route) because the checkpoint police don't really check. If you get unlucky, a ten/twenty dollar bill should sort things out.
Posted by: Jay | August 04, 2012 at 09:09 AM