Mars rover ready to roll
From Kate Tobin
CNN Science Unit
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This snippet of a panoramic color photo from Mars shows "Sleepy Hollow," a depression Spirit may explore.
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Pandemonium erupts as Spirit makes a safe landing on Mars.
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(CNN) -- Mission managers are preparing to roll the Mars rover Spirit off its lander early Thursday, positioning it for departure down a rear ramp.
If all goes as planned, what is termed "egress" will begin at 1 a.m. ET Thursday, with mission controllers sending the rover commands to move three meters down a ramp and onto the Martian soil.
"We will be driving three meters forward on the surface of Mars and leaving our lander for good," said engineer Kevin Burke at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"Not without a parting shot, though. We do plan on taking a couple of images of our lovely delivery system, ... give the engineers their due, and get to see their hardware for the last time."
Mission controllers at the JPL expect those images to be transmitted back to Earth around 4 a.m.
Mission managers planned to roll the rover off the front ramp of the lander, but had to change that plan after an airbag failed to retract properly.
They trained for that contingency, however, and were prepared to turn the rover on the deck of the lander and roll it off via the rear ramp.
"What we are going to do as soon as we egress off the lander, the next thing we're planning on doing is deploying the robotic arm," said mission manager Jennifer Trosper.
"The first day we'll kind of hover over soil and take some microscopic images, and the second day we'll actually deploy the instruments on the soil, and then we'll swap instruments, and then we'll stow and get ready to drive."
Project scientists have likened Spirit to a robotic geologist. The rover's mission is to study rocks and soil in an effort to determine whether the cold, desert world once was a warm, wet planet.
Spirit will first analyze rocks and soil near the lander, eventually making its way toward a large crater about 300 feet away.
After exploring that area, the rover will literally "head for the hills," making its way toward an area called the "East Hill Complex."
"I cannot tell you that we are going to reach those hills," principal investigator Steve Squyres said Tuesday.
"Our requirement for how far we should be able to traverse over the course of the mission, was 600 meters. These hills are five times that far away. OK, so don't sit here and think, 'Oh, we're going to go to the hills.' We're going to go 'toward' the hills."
Squyres will also manage the scientific payload on Spirit's identical twin, Opportunity.
Opportunity is scheduled to complete the 300 million-mile trip to Mars next weekend. It will land on the opposite side of the planet from Spirit's landing site inside the Gusev Crater, a nearly 100-mile-wide pockmark just south of the Martian equator.
Spirit and Opportunity have considerably more mobility and capability than the most recent successful visitor to Mars.
The 1997 NASA mission included the Pathfinder lander, which beamed back thousands of images, and Sojourner, a toy-sized test rover that scurried around the rocks and boulders littering the landing site.
Each of the new rovers is built to explore nearly as much distance in several days as Sojourner covered in three months, about 100 yards.
Each comes equipped with eight cameras that should provide stunning panoramas of the Martian surface, with resolutions so sharp they retain crisp detail when blown up to the size of a movie screen, according to NASA.
Their microscopes, spectrometers and drills could unlock geologic secrets from billions of years ago, when scientists think the planet may have had conditions more suitable for life.
CNN.com writer/editor Richard Stenger contributed to this report.
