Opportunity used her Panoramic Camera (Pancam) to take this image shortly after bouncing down on Mars, at 9:05 p.m., Jan. 24, 2004 PST. One of the first images the rover beamed back to Earth, it shows the Martian landscape at Meridiani Planum—and it clearly shows that the rover scored, astonishingly, Earth’s first interplanetary hole-in-one by bouncing down and then rolling right into a small crater soon named Eagle.
For MER Project Scientist Matt Golombek, the landings were the moments he ranks as his favorites. With a “day job” of selecting landing site candidates on Mars, he had recommended the site chosen for Pathfinder/Sojourner, and he played the lead role at JPL in researching and selecting both Gusev Crater plains, where an ancient lake once might have been, and Meridiani Planum, where hematite, a mineral that forms in water, lit the orbital mineral detectors.
“What you actually do when you make the landing site selections is predicting that the surface is safe for landing and for roving,” Golombek explained. The landing site committee members used Viking data, and for Spirit and Opportunity added data from instruments onboard the Mars Global Surveyor data, and went the distance by predicting the amount of dust to be expect at the sites, along with other environmental considerations. NASA, of course, made the final decisions.
When Spirit’s and then Opportunity’s initial images appeared on the monitors at JPL and everyone got the first clear views of what the surface was like, Golombek was “pretty darn happy.” Summing up those moments with his characteristic laughter, he said: “We nailed it.”
From the rock strewn terrain of Gusev to the bedrock shock of Meridiani Planum, Mars rocked the Internet, as more than a billion people logged on NASA, JPL, and mirror websites to get a glimpse of this magically desolate planet.
Planetary scientist Abby Fraeman, who grew up with the rovers, remembers that night too. She was 16 then and one of Student Astronauts on The Planetary Society’s Red Rover Goes to Mars Project. “When those first pictures came down from Eagle Crater and everyone was going: ‘I see bedrock. I think I see cross bedding in the bedrock.’ I’m wondering: ‘What is crossbedding? What is bedrock? What does that mean?’ At that point I hadn’t had any geology classes, but I really wanted to stay and be one of the people who could look at those rocks and understand what they were seeing.”
That experience put Fraeman on her career track that led to her current position as MER Deputy Project Scientist. “From the perspective of a college student, there was a future for exploration of Mars,” she said. “That, for me, was very bright and exciting. I figured if I found something more interesting, I’d change my major, but I never found anything cooler than working with the rovers on Mars.”
