Adventures on Mars

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Opportunity rover zipped its first pictures of Mars to Earth early Sunday, delighting and puzzling scientists just hours after the unmanned spacecraft successfully landed on the Red Planet three weeks behind its identical twin.\nThe pictures showed a surface smooth and dark red in some places and strewn with fragmented slabs of light bedrock in others. Bounce marks apparently left by the rover's air bags on landing were clearly visible in the foreground.\n"I am flabbergasted. I am astonished. I am blown away. Opportunity has touched down in an alien and bizarre landscape," said Steven Squyres, the mission's main scientist, at a news conference early Sunday. "I still don't know what we're looking at."\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration began receiving the first of dozens of black-and-white and color images from Opportunity about 1 a.m. PST, or four hours after its apparently flawless landing. Mars at the time was 124 million miles from Earth.\nMission members hooted and hollered as the images splashed on a screen in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\n"The pictures just blow me away. We've certainly not been to this place before," deputy project manager Richard Cook said.\nThe unmanned, six-wheeled rover landed at 9:05 p.m. PST in Meridiani Planum, believed to be the smoothest, flattest region on Mars. Meridiani lies 6,600 miles and halfway around the planet from where Opportunity's twin, Spirit, landed Jan. 3.\nInitial analysis of the images suggested Opportunity landed within a shallow crater. Its low rim shouldn't block the rolling robot's path once it gets going, Squyres said.\n"It's smooth sailing to the horizon," he said.\nMore immediately, the rover's path to the martian surface from its lander also appeared unobstructed by its deflated air bags, mission manager Matt Wallace said. Puffed-out pieces of air bag delayed Spirit's roll-off for several days.\nTogether, the twin, 384-pound rovers make up a single $820 million mission to seek out geologic evidence if Mars ever was a wetter world capable of sustaining life. NASA launched Spirit on June 10 and Opportunity followed July 7. Each carries nine cameras and six scientific instruments.\nOn Wednesday, Spirit developed serious problems, cutting off what had been its own steady flow of pictures and other scientific data.\nScientists said Saturday they should be able to fix the problem in coming weeks.\nNASA administrator Sean O'Keefe broke open a bottle of champagne and toasted the mission -- just as he did after Spirit's own landing.\n"As the old saying goes, it's far better to be lucky than good, but you know, the harder we work the luckier we seem to get," O'Keefe said, adding "no one dared hope" that both rover landings would be so successful.\nNASA sent Spirit to Gusev Crater, a broad depression believed to once have contained a lake. It landed Opportunity in Meridiani Planum, which scientists believe abounds in a mineral called gray hematite. The iron-rich mineral typically forms in marine or volcanic environments marked by hydrothermal activity.\nNASA launched two rovers to double its chances of successfully landing on Mars. Just one in three international efforts to land on the planet has succeeded.\nAs of early Sunday, there were a record five spacecraft operating on or around Mars. Two NASA satellites and one from the European Space Agency are orbiting the planet.\nJust 24 hours earlier, with Spirit's prognosis uncertain and Opportunity still thousands of miles from Mars, NASA scientists had been unsure what the day would bring.\n"There was a good chance we would be fighting a war on two fronts," Wallace, the mission manager, said. "Instead, we have the best party in town.