Second rover sends pictures from Mars

5.00pm - By STEVE GORMAN and PETER HENDERSON

PASADENA, California - NASA's second Mars rover, Opportunity, scored "an interplanetary hole-in-one" by safely landing inside a shallow impact crater, coming face to face with the first exposed bedrock ever seen on the Red Planet, mission scientists said on Sunday.

Images of red and grey soil and an outcrop of "slabby" rock taken hours after the landing by Opportunity puzzled and delighted the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, already elated the spacecraft's crippled twin, Spirit, appeared to be on the path to recovery.

In a stroke of luck, Opportunity came to rest inside a small, shallow crater -- roughly 20m wide and 2m deep -- and just a few metres from the intriguing bedrock formation visible on the inside lip of the crater.

"We have scored a 300-million-mile, interplanetary hole in one, and we are inside an impact crater," Steve Squyres, the principal science investigator for the rover mission, told reporters at a Sunday afternoon briefing.

He said the landing site far surpassed his hope of landing anywhere near such a crater.

The first pictures beamed back from Opportunity showed a terrain unlike any previously seen on the red planet.

Besides the first bedrock ever seen, much of the landing zone appeared draped in a fine-grain soil devoid of the rocks and boulders strewn about other areas on Mars, including Gusev Crater, the massive basin thought to be an ancient lake bed where Spirit set down Jan. 3.

The exposed bedrock was an exciting discovery.

"One of the things about bedrock is you know where it came from," Squyres said. "These rocks grew up right in this neighbourhood," unlike loose stones at Spirit's landing site that could have come from anywhere.

Opportunity's mission is to explore a wide, flat plain, the Meridiani Planum, that appears to contain large deposits of a crystalline, iron-bearing mineral called hematite, which on Earth usually forms in the presence of water.

With the safe landing at 6.05pm Sunday (NZ time), the US space agency has achieved the historic feat of successfully setting down two robotic rovers on opposite side of Mars within three weeks to search for signs of water, and ultimately life.

Opportunity emerged from its cocoon of protective air bags in time to send a slew of images to the orbiting Odyssey satellite, which relayed them to Earth. The rover seemed to be in perfect health, NASA said.

One photo showed a grey landscape punctuated by dots of red where the lander had bounced across the plain, disturbing the fine soil, and what looked like red, wind-swept dunes.

Squyres said he was flabbergasted by soil that looked pebbly, but, where touched by the lander, appeared to have the texture of talcum powder.

"This is exactly what (Meridiani Planum) looked like in my wildest dreams," Squyres joked. "We are going to go to that outcrop as fast as we can," he added.

The six-wheeled rover will roll off the lander in a week and a half to two weeks, barring complications stemming from a malfunction this week that paralysed Spirit.

Spirit suffered a communication breakdown on Wednesday, but scientists believe they have traced the problem to a glitch in its memory and can work around or cure it within a few weeks.

Using the analogy of a hospital patient's condition, Mars exploration rover project manager Pete Theisinger said Spirit's status "is still serious, but ... I think we've got a patient that is well onto its way to recovery."

Encased in its cluster of air bags upon landing, Opportunity initially came to rest on its side but righted itself as it was designed to do. The golf cart-sized rover, still in a compact crouch for its seven-month, 283-million-mile journey from Earth, then unfurled its solar panels before nightfall on Mars to charge its batteries.

- REUTERS