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I haven’t really followed the event very carefully but its a really intriguing event in space history. More than half of the the manned objects sent to Mars have not succeeded, and following the famed Pathfinder in 1998, it’s the second significant landing that has ever been accomplished there. From the JPL site:
The first 360-degree color view from NASA’s Spirit Mars Exploration Rover presents a range of tempting targets from nearby rocks to hills on the horizon.
“The whole panorama is there before us,” said rover science- team member Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego. “It’s a great opening to the next stage of our mission.”
Spirit’s flight team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., continues making progress toward getting the rover off its lander platform, but expected no sooner than early Thursday morning. “We’re about to kick the baby bird out of its nest,” said JPL’s Kevin Burke, lead mechanical engineer for the rover’s egress off the lander.
The color panorama is a mosaic stitched from 225 frames taken by Spirit’s panoramic camera. It spans 75 frames across, three frames tall, with color information from shots through three different filters. The images were calibrated at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., home institution for Dr. Jim Bell, panoramic camera team leader.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2004 at 3:25 pm, EST under the category of PerlBlog Days. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.