Originally published July 26 2005
Mars rovers exceed life and data expectations
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity were expected to be rendered useless by dusty solar panels after just a few months of use, but The Boston Globe reports that, 18 months after their launch, the two golf cart-sized explorers are still running strong and sending back data that NASA scientists never expected.
Within weeks of arriving on the Martian surface, the twin rovers did what they had come to do: They found convincing evidence that there was water in the planet's past, perhaps suggesting life could have arisen and survived there.
But the extra time has dramatically changed the outcome of the mission, allowing evidence of past water to be discovered near both landing sites, and providing a far more complex -- and more varied -- picture of the planet's surface than mission scientists had believed possible.
The longevity of the mission has allowed scientists to gather a tremendous amount of data about the watery history of the red planet.
The ubiquitous rusty dust that coats Mars -- and gives it its distinctive color -- is remarkably uniform, according to findings reported in the July 7 issue of the journal Nature.
Magnetite usually forms in contact with water -- but it takes very little water to create the reaction, perhaps just the thinnest film of occasional dew.
Just in the last few months, Bell said, they have finally been finding new evidence, including concentrations of sulfur, that prove ''that ground water was an important part" of the area's history.
''Who knows what happens when we get there," Bell said, but there appear to be very different kinds of layered rocks coming into view there.
There is evidence in bedrock exposed in craters in the plain that serious amounts of water once flowed there -- just what scientists had been hoping to find, because the presence of water is considered the most basic necessity for the possibility of life having arisen on Mars.
The amazing longevity of the rovers can be attributed to three things, Bell said in an interview: Very good engineering, with ''robust systems" that had a lot of durability built in; careful operations, in which the team has always been conservative in maintaining the rovers' power, despite tantalizing targets always awaiting examination; and, of course, good luck, including the way the winds have repeatedly scoured off the accumulation of dust that the scientists thought would have dropped their power output by now to be almost unusable.
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