NASA’s Spirit rover completed completed one full turn around the Sun on Monday 21, exploring Mars.
With this event researchers a completed a martian-year-long look at the Martian seasons.
“We feel like, weather-wise, we’ve just about seen it all,” said Sharon Laubach, the rover’s integrating sequence team chief, in a telephone interview given to the Space.com site. “We’ve gone through all the seasons, we’ve survived Marti winterand gone through conjunction…yes, we’re having a party.”
One Mars year is about 687 Earth days.
“It’s a big, important milestone,” said Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rover’s science mission at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “We’ll have acquired an entire year’s worth of observations.”
In 670 martian days Spirit has rolled across 3.3 miles (5.4 kilometers) of Martian terrain at its landing site inside the planet’s Gusev crater.
His twin robotic rover Opportunity will complete its first Martian year exploring the plains of Meridiani Planum on Dec. 11. Both rovers touched down on Mars in January 2004 on a primary mission that spanned 90 days.
Martian Seasons
Spirit and Opportunity are facing the final days of Martian summer and preparing for the onset of autumn.
During its first Martian year, Spirit found dust devils swirling across the planet’s landscape and frost settling on the its surface, researchers said, adding that the fringes of a major dust storm may have brushed Opportunity last month.
“So the planet, though it seems dead, does have a vibrant atmosphere,” explained Amitabha Ghosh, an atmospheric scientist and rover science team member with Gaithersburg, Maryland’s Tharsis, Inc.
Ghosh is using the mast-mounted Miniature Thermal Emissions Spectrometer (Mini-TES) aboard both rovers to study atmospheric changes depending on the Martian season.
Mars researchers initially hoped to find many dust devils roaming across the Martian surface, but had to wait until early spring on the planet before the first whirlwinds were caught by Spirit’s cameras.
The infrared Mini-TES instrument, which is also used by geologists to determine Martian rock and soil minerals, records the temperature changes, dust levels and water vapor in Mars’ atmosphere. Mars researchers can also use each rover’s panoramic camera, which sits next to Mini-TES on the mast, to record dust devils, clouds and wind – which has apparently brushed the robot’s solar arrays clean from time to time.
Sources: Space.com, NASA.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell
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