Fact Sheet
Making Tracks
A stuck wheel on the Spirit rover dug a deep furrow in the Columbia Hills of Mars, revealing a white material just below the surface. The material may be rich in silica, indicating that it formed in a warm, wet environment in the distant past. Spirit has discovered that the Columbia Hills were once much like Yellowstone National Park, with geysers, hot springs, and explosions of steam from below the surface. The landscape looks distorted because this is an extreme wide-angle view from the rover's rear navigation camera. One of the rover's six wheels died months ago, so the rover now moves backwards, dragging the dead wheel through the soil. [NASA/JPL/Caltech]
|