Word: terrain
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...back this week, they could see more of the same, that is if Spirit--which has been operating splendidly but has not yet budged from the safety of its landing platform--at last rolls cautiously down onto the red Martian soil, preparing for three months of rambling the alien terrain...
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...
Whenever Spirit finally starts to travel, it will have no shortage of targets. The vehicle's nine cameras have been drinking in images of the surrounding terrain and beaming them back to Earth in brilliantly sharp resolution, sometimes even in 3-D. Every day six teams of J.P.L. scientists gather in a large, classroom-like office to study the pictures on several 6-ft.-wide projection screens, smaller laptop-size screens and flat electronic slates. What they have found has intrigued and in some cases mystified them...
...away. The robot was designed to travel only about half that distance, but there's nothing to say it can't exceed expectations. Matt Golembek, a J.P.L. geologist, thinks Spirit has a shot at capturing the view from the summit of a mound. "Given how smooth and flat the terrain is," he says, "everyone feels pretty comfortable that that might be someplace...
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...