On firm dirt, Rover ready to paw Mars

With a flood of photos, scientists knew that they were once again on the surface of Mars.

They came like cosmic "Wish You Were Here" postcards on an early Thursday morning when scientific achievement seemed strangely like a slumber party. In crisp black and white, the images showed wheels caked in dust, intriguing rocks at arm's length, and the first tracks on a pristine landscape - all to the whoops of mission control.

After 11 anxious days of rotating and revolving to find the safest route off the lander platform, Spirit crawled the last nine feet Thursday of a 300-million mile journey to Martian soil. All told, the rover had been flung across space, scorched in the atmosphere, and then bounced 900 feet across the landscape in a protective shell of airbags.

At last, the most sophisticated machine in the history of human space exploration was ready to get to work.

It is a tool unlike any previously available to space scientists. Its Swiss-Army array of sensors and cameras, its microscope and grinding wheel - all mounted on a mobile rover - make for the best extraterrestrial geologist since Harrison Schmitt returned form the Moon on Apollo 17.

Already, the mission plan has become clear. Spirit will start cautiously before setting out on an ambitious journey within Gusev that could bring it to the lip of a smaller, dune-filled crater and up the slopes of a range of distant hills. With every opportunity, Spirit will scrape, sift, and claw in hope of finding evidence that water once filled the Connecticut-size bowl of Gusev crater beneath the Martian equator.

"This suite of instruments takes us to a scale of understanding of Mars rocks that we have never had before," says Albert Haldemann, a project scientist here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

For the first few days, the instruments and the rover will merely orient themselves, taking rudimentary data and testing various systems - including the rover's robotic arm. In fact, the rover might not move again for at least a day or two. By the end of the weekend, though, scientists expect to begin the mission in earnest, making the daily decisions of where the best science might be and how to get to it.

"We're handing over the keys [to the scientists]," said engineer Chris Lewicki at a 3 a.m. press conference that often seemed more like an Oscar ceremony of speeches and "thank you's." "We got a chance to drive the car for a while, but in the end, we're just the valets driving the car around in front."

That process of simply moving from place to place is, in itself, a testament to the rover's advanced technology. In the first days, driver Brian Cooper and his colleagues will don 3-D glasses, look at the terrain on a computer screen, and stick a graphic lawn dart in the rock or hollow where scientists want to go.

While Pathfinder's Sojourner, NASA's 1997 Mars rover, had roughly 80 navigational commands to maneuver, Spirit has more than 850. The commands for each day will be written out while the rover sleeps during the Martian night, and typed into a computer program that interprets the directions for the rover before it moves an inch.

"While it's driving, we're asleep," says Dr. Cooper, who also piloted Sojourner in 1997.

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