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Robot From Earth Climbs Mountain On Mars
Leicester, UK (SPX) Aug 24, 2005 428 sols after reaching the foot of the Columbia Hills and 582 sols after landing, Mars Exploration Rover 'Spirit' has finally arrived atop Husband Hill - some 90 metres above the basaltic floor of Gusev Crater. After a two month sprint to the foot of the hills, Spirit had developed a sticky front right wheel, which lead mission engineers to devise a technique of driving backwards, leaving that wheel locked to save it for the accuracy demanding drives toward targets. After surviving the worst of the Martian winter - just - Spirit has now driven approximately 4750 metres ( 3 miles ) and taken more than 59000 images, 40000 with its high resolution Pancam which has provided our first glimpse of the terrain beyond the summit of Husband Hill. As has increasingly been the case of the past few months - the internet based community of image processing experts has come up trumps producing stunning panoramas within hours of the images arriving on the ground. On Sol 581, Spirit used its wide angle NavCam to take a partial panorama looking ahead toward the peak - at which point the summit still obscured a little of the horizon beyond. Unmannedspaceflight.com forum member Peter Greutmann (Tman) produced a stunning 5 frame mosaic showing the road to the summit ahead and fortuitously, one of the largest dust devils imaged to date - several kilometres to the north, and several hundred metres across.
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