Posted by Davin Flateau on 6 Jun 2005 at 9:20 am.
Filed under Astronomy.
After a month of being stuck in a martian sand dune, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity finally worked its way free on Saturday.
“We’re out!…all six wheels are on top of the soil,” said Steve Squyres in an online status report he posted on Saturday.
“Boy, this has been a good day. We’ve had a feeling over the past several days that this was coming[…]The first thing we’re going to do is simply take a very hard look at the stuff we were stuck in.”
The rover, now in its 485th Martian day on the surface, has its talented team of earthling engineers thank for the escape. As soon as NASA found out the rover’s wheels had almost sunk completey into the sand, the rover team sprung into action, recreating the situation in their “sandbox” testbed. By mixing different types and sand, they were able to accurately come up with a representation of what Opportunity was up against. Engineers even lightened the rover to simulate the reduced gravity on Mars. Soon, they had a very deliberate plan to gradually work the rover out, and after spinning its wheels that would normally move it 581 feet, it only moved a scant 3 feet - enough to get its six wheels on Ares Firma.
Just another day in the office for NASA, offroading by remote control on an alien planet 107 million miles away.
