PASADENA, Calif., Aug 7 (Reuters) - NASA's
newly landed Mars science rover Curiosity snapped the first color image of its
surroundings while an orbiting sister probe photographed litter left behind
during the rover's daring do-or-die descent to the surface, scientists said
Tuesday.
Curiosity's color image, taken with a dust
cover still on the camera lens, shows the north wall and rim of Gale Crater, a
vast basin where the nuclear-powered, six-wheeled rover touched down Sunday
night after flying through space for more than eight months.
The picture proved that one of the rover's
key instruments, a camera known as the Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, was in
good working order affixed to the end of Curiosity robot arm.
Designed to take magnified, close-up images
of rocks and other objects, or wide shots of landscapes, the camera currently
remains stowed on the rover's deck. But once in full operation, scientists can
use it to capture fine details with a resolution as high as 13.9 microns per
pixel -- several times finer than the width of a human hair.
"It works. It's awesome. Can't wait to
open it and see what else we can see," Curiosity scientist Ken Edgett told
reporters on Tuesday.
The latest images were relayed to Earth
during the rover's first full day on the Red Planet, following a descent
through the Martian atmosphere and touchdown on Sunday night that NASA hailed
as the most elaborate and challenging ever in robotic spaceflight.
The $2.5 billion project is NASA's first
astrobiology mission since the Viking probes of the 1970s, and the landing came
as a much-welcome success for a space agency beleaguered by science budget cuts
and the recent cancellation of its 30-year-old space shuttle program.
The primary mission of Curiosity, touted as
first fully equipped mobile laboratory ever sent to another world, is to search
for evidence that the planet most similar to Earth now harbors, or once hosted,
the key ingredients necessary for the evolution of microbial life.
But mission controllers at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in California plan to put the rover and its instruments
through several weeks of thorough checks and trial operations before gradually
beginning science exploration in earnest.
They want to be sure the car-sized vehicle
and its sensitive components came through the tricky, jarring final leg of
Curiosity's 352 million-mile (566 million-km) journey to Mars without damage.
Encased in a protective capsule, the rover
blasted into the Martian sky at 17 times the speed of sound and slowed itself
using friction from steering through the thin atmosphere.
Closer to the ground, the vessel was slowed
further by a giant, supersonic parachute before a jet backpack and flying
"sky crane" took over to deliver Curiosity the last mile to the
surface at 10:32 p.m. PDT on Sunday (1:32 a.m. EDT on Monday/0532 GMT on
Monday).
A day later, NASA's sharp-eyed Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter surveyed the scene from a vantage point 186 miles (300
km) above the planet and found Curiosity's approach to Gale Crater littered
with discarded equipment used to position the rover near a towering mountain
rising from the crater floor.
"You can see all the components of the
entry, descent and landing system," said camera scientist Sarah Milkovich.
The satellite's "crime scene"
image, released Tuesday, lays out the trail of debris beginning about 1,312
yards (1,200 meters) from Curiosity's landing site. That is where the heat
shield came to rest it was jettisoned during descent.
The back shell of the capsule, which
contained the parachute, ended up about 673 yards away from the rover. The last
part of the elaborate landing system, the rocket-powered "sky crane"
crash-landed 711 yards away after lowering Curiosity to the ground on a tether.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's image shows
the heat shield in a region dotted with small craters, while Curiosity is
surrounded by rounded hills and fewer craters. To the north is a third type of
terrain riddled with buttes, mesas and pits.
"If it were up to me I would go to
where those three come together, so we could start to get the flavor of what's
going on here in terms of the different geologic materials," Edgett said.
Scientists expect it will be weeks until
Curiosity begins roving and months before it heads to the 3-mile (5-km) high
mountain at the center of the crater, the primary target for the two-year
science mission.
Scientists believe the mound, known as
Mount Sharp, may have formed from the remains of sediment that once completely
filled the basin, offering a potentially valuable geologic record of the
history of Mars.
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