US Rover blinks, Mars in colour

The US Robotic probe Spirit beamed panoramic colour images of ‘‘unprecedented clarity’’ back to Earth on Sunday after establishing direct contact with NASA scientists guiding its search for ancient signs of life on Mars. The successful deployment of the rover’s lollipop-shaped main antenna cuts delay in communications between the rover and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena to about nine minutes from the hours needed to relay signals through two Mars orbiters, flight director Jason Willis said. At 9:20 pm, the JPL control room erupted in cheers as test signals showed that the rover had correctly located Earth in the martian sky and had positioned the main ‘‘high gain’’ antenna correctly. Mission officials said the rover had landed in a ‘‘scientific sweet spot’’. ‘‘This is just fantastic. We got the high gain antenna to work on the very first try,’’ Spirit mission manager Mark Adler said. ‘‘We are ready for the rest of the mission.’’ Spirit began transmitting science and telemetry data, as well as the mission’s first colour images of the martian landscape from the rover’s high-resolution panoramic cameras.

‘‘I expect to see a lot of good stuff on this pass,’’ Adler said, adding that scientists planned to ‘‘wake up’’ the rover four or five times during the night to calibrate temperature sensors that may have failed.

‘‘It’s a lot flatter than I expected and a lot less rocky than I expected,’’ geologist Wendy Calvin told reporters at an Sunday evening news conference. —Reuters