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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