Word: crater
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...real news, however, was made on the Red Planet. The 90-mile-wide Gusev Crater--located about 15° south of the planet's equator--resembles a dry lake bed, one that could easily have been drenched with water from what appears to be a 559-mile-long river channel entering it from the southeast. If there was once Martian water, it should have ponded there. If there was once Martian life, it might have called this great lake home...
That possibility, plus Gusev's relatively smooth, obstacle-free terrain, is why the crater presented such a tempting target--and why NASA scientists are so thrilled that the spacecraft made it. "If you were looking for a place to land in the U.S., geologists would land in the Grand Canyon and engineers would land [in a plain] like Kansas," says paleontologist Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover long-range-planning team. "Gusev gives us both a congenial site for roving and still has a high probability of getting to good outcroppings...
...scattering of small craters within the larger Gusev Crater are attractive to mission planners as well. Such secondary-impact pits do geologists' excavation work for them, gouging away upper layers of soil and rock and offering a free peek at what lies below. There appears to be an especially inviting population of small craters to the east and southeast of the rover, providing one more reason for Spirit to head that way when it dismounts. "We've got a capable machine, but we can't dig 20-ft. holes with it," says Squyres. "The way to do that...
Choosing the rocks most worthy of the attention of all this hardware won't be easy. J.P.L. scientists admit that Gusev Crater looks a little less pristine than they had hoped. Since the time its water vanished, the terrain may have been covered by lava, blasted by incoming meteorites, and then further eroded by millions of years of winds. It will take some doing to find the rocks that have been least affected by all that. Making a choice and then getting to a prize sample could take more than five days. On a mission that may last no more...
...Civil War movie Cold Mountain, based on Charles Frazier's best-selling novel, opens with the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg in 1864, when Union forces dug a 500-ft. tunnel, packed it with 8,000 lbs. of gunpowder and blew up the Confederate line, creating a huge crater that became a deathtrap for their own troops...