A successful Mars landing!
The brilliant folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory smoothly landed a new six-wheeled roverbot, Spirit, on the surface of Mars at 11:35 PM EST last night. JPL has previously executed such sensational missiona as the Voyager mission to the outer planets; the first ever Mars landings (Viking 1 & 2); and Galileo, which finally allowed us to conclude that that planet's icy moon Europa likely has a subsurface liquid ocean which may possibly harbor life; and many, many other successful missions.

Even for an outfit which has enjoyed such success in the past, Mars is sort of the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system, and landing a craft on the surface is notoriously difficult; even successfully entering orbit has proven an elusive goal in the past. The European Space Agency unfortunately seems to have lost their Mars lander, Beagle 2, which was supposed to land on the surface on Christmas day (though, more happily, that mission's parent ship Mars Explorer has entered orbit around Mars, and is conducting burns to lower itself to its operational orbit over the next week). The apparent loss of Beagle 2 follows some costly and embarrassing failures in the late 1990s by JPL themselves, such as Mars Climate Observer, and the infamous Mars Polar Lander, which reportedly crashed upon landing because the JPL team was inputting metric figures into its computer, while the Lockheed subcontractor had programmed the computer to figure in English units, and the craft basically lost track of where it was. All this is not to mention the really notorious, billion-dollar Mars Observer mission, launched in 1992 and lost in 1993.

Why to mention all these past failures? Certainly not to rub it in; JPL is one of the finest teams in the aerospace industry. Only to illustrate how really, profoundly difficult it is to do what they just accomplished. Certainly not for want of trying, this is the first successful Mars landing since the very photogenic and popular Pathfinder/Sojourner mission which touched down on July 4, 1997, which itself had been the first landing since Viking. Yesterday's success is tremendously exciting, and the mission's ongoing progress can be followed at the JPL home page.

This is significant also because Mars is probably the second most exciting venue for solar system exploration right now, after the aforementioned tantalizing Europa possibilities. There are two ongoing and very illuminating orbiter missions: Mars Global Surveyor (which has taken high resolution photographs of the entire surface of Mars, yielding topographical knowledge simlilar to what we know about remote regions of Earth) and 2001 Mars Odyssey (largely intended to replace the lost Mars Climate Observer mentioned earlier). These have shown visual indications that Mars is currently possessed of some amounts of water, possibly sometimes in liquid form, though recent findings have not been encouraging to those believe Mars was once warm, water-covered, and basically Earthlike. The more water that is there now, the likelier that native Martian bacterial life forms may exist or may have existed; the past presence of liquid oceans would have made possible even more complex life forms in the past, which may be detectable in Mars's fossil record.

Remember the excitement in 1996 when Bill Clinton announced that NASA had found proof of past life on Mars based on analysis of structures found in a Martian meteorite? Those were suggestive, but the original analysis of that particular rock is now generally accepted as inconclusive at best. Spirit should be able to yield additional information on whether we should ultimately expect to find evidence of past native Martian life. I'll be watching their results eagerly.