I’ve been following the Spirit landing with interest, and something occurred to me (and brought back memories from Pathfinder in’97), namely that the nature of the landing used large inflatable balloons. Now the NASA animations depict Spirit rolling accross the Martian landscape to its place of rest prior to rover deployment.
I’m just wondering if we are supposed to be seeing the track of the rover’s gasbags as it rolled across the surface, or whether or not these bags were too light to disturb the Martian soil, or if the soil was too hard to be noticably disturbed or even if winds at the landing site have obscured any such disturbances…
If anyone could enlighten me on this I would be most apreciative!
One of the experts that worked on the project said there was a depression behind the rover they wanted to look at. This was in one of the pictures the rover took. Wild guess, it was 50-100 feet away?
The guy interviewing him ask what the dark object in the despression was and the expert said it could be the imprint of the gasbags as they bounced. Sounded like the despression was the first place they wanted to go anyway.
Note the wheel tracks left behind. It’s a different rover (Sojourner) at a different site so the conditions may be very different, but I think that’s as good a guess as any right now.
Having just watched the NASA news conference, they mentioned some marks that could have been from the air bags.
Also, from (IIRC) the airbags being retracted, there was a picture of some disturbed soil which appeared to be “cohesive” – IOW, it acted like mud or clay. Should be interesting to find out what that material is.
It’s interesting that there’s no obvious marks, I’d always assumed that such a high energy landing (and bouncing) would have left some serious dents or something…but obviously not.
It will be interesting when that depression gets checked out though. Hopefully Oppurtunity will be similarly blessed with good fortune!