SPACE WIRE
Storm clouds over Australia give US Mars robot a day of rest
WASHINGTON (AFP) Jan 21, 2004
Thunder and lightning storms over Australia Wednesday prevented NASA from sending the Mars robot Spirit its daily "road map," giving the six-wheeled explorer a rest on its 18th day on Mars, NASA said.

During the 15-minute window when NASA normally uplinks daily instructions to Spirit, which on Wednesday was to be via an antenna at the Deep Space Network in Canberra, rain, thunder and lightning in the region rendered the signal ineffectively weak, said Mars mission official Jennifer Trosper.

"When the Rover woke up this morning, we were over the Deep Space Network station in Canberra," she said.

"There was lightning, there was rain and thunderstorm in Canberra. The morning time frame on Mars, between 9:00 am and 9:45 am, is an important time frame for us to take all of the work we did overnight, the command sequences we built for the Rover, and send those to the Rover.

"Then it would start to act on those."

But due to the weather in Canberra, "the signal strength was not able to be received by the Rover, we were not able to transmit the command to the Rover. The Rover continues to run on yesterday's master sequence," she said, consisting of basic tasks such as awakening, data transmission and putting itself on standby.

"So not a lot of science was done today," said Trosper.

On Thursday, Spirit is scheduled to continue its analysis of a football-size martian rock -- named "Adirondack" by NASA scientists -- using for the first time an instrument called a rock abrasion tool (RAT) afixed to the rover's robotic arm and designed to drill into rocks.

The rock has already been examined by a microscope coupled to a camera, and by two instruments that display the composition of rocks, a Mossbauer spectrometer and an X-ray spectrometer, but the results of those analyses have not yet been made public.

The robot traveled three meters in two minutes to reach Adirondack, but numerous photographic sessions brought the total outing to 30 minutes.

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