Roving Mars Page #5

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but what we found was lava -

volcanic rock,

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The sedimentary rock must be there,

but it's been buried under the lava,

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and we couldn't get to it,

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When we realized that we hadn't landed

on the stuff we came for,

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we decided

we had to go someplace else,

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A mile and a half away,

there's this spectacular range of hills

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called the Columbia Hills,

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You gotta remember ''Spirit'' was designed

to go only 600 yards over its lifetime,

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so we set out for those hills

not knowing if we'd ever make it,

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Meanwhile, on the other side of Mars,

''Opportunity'' was about to land,

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When ''Opportunity'' landed

at Eagle Crater,

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it was a 300 million-mile

interplanetary hole in one,

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We rolled to a stop

right in front of layered bedrock,

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Bedrock is geologic truth,

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''Opportunity'' landed

in front of a Martian history book,

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When we drove off the lander

and looked at the soil in front of us,

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we saw that it was littered with

what looked like little round beads,

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an uncountable number

of little round things,

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We took out our microscope, we reached

out and looked at the soil in detail,

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and the picture that came down

was astounding,

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They were perfect spheres,

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l will remember for the rest of my life

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how l felt when l saw that first picture,

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When we got to the outcrop

and looked at it up close,

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we realized that the spheres

are embedded in the rock

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like blueberries in a muffin,

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The rock erodes away and the blueberries

fall out and roll down into the soil,

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The blueberries are made of hematite,

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a mineral that on Earth

is often formed in liquid water,

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Next we found jarosite, which is a mineral

that couldn't have formed

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unless there'd been water in the rocks,

so there was water underground here,

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Our most extraordinary discovery came

when we found ripples in the rocks,

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ancient ripples formed when water flowed

over sand on Mars billions of years ago,

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So there wasn't just

water underground here,

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there was water at the surface,

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''Opportunity'' discovered that

at this place billions of years ago,

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Mars was most likely a habitable world,

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A place that, for some interval of time,

was suitable for some forms of life,

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Decades of work paid off

with this discovery,

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Billions of years ago, there were

shallow occasional pools of water,

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Don't think an ocean,

Think of salt flats,

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And the water may not have been

a pretty blue,

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ln fact, it may have been so acid,

it dissolved iron out of the rocks

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and made wine-red pools

under a pink Martian sky,

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All the discoveries that ''Opportunity''

made about water

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happened in the first six weeks

of the mission,

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Everything went right for that rover,

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l call ''Opportunity''

''Little Miss Perfect,''

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''Opportunity'' lands

where the evidence is right there,

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The driving is like a parking lot,

Everything is perfect,

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''Spirit,'' our kind of tough,

hard-working, blue-collar rover,

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lands in this awful, rocky,

rugged place on a lava plain

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a mile and a half from

the nearest interesting rocks

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and has to struggle for five months

just to begin her mission,

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''Spirit'' had to work for everything,

literally had to climb a mountain on Mars,

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We use the power

that comes from the sun

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to operate the vehicle

and to charge the batteries,

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so the solar arrays are essential,

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On the way to the Columbia Hills,

''Spirit's'' solar arrays got coated with dust,

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We were getting to the point

where ''Spirit'' was simply gonna die,

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Then, one wonderful day, we climbed up

onto the crest of a ridge,

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where we were hit by not one

but several gusts of wind

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that just cleaned the solar arrays off,

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lt was like having a brand-new rover,

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''Spirit'' got high up in the Columbia Hills

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and started to find stuff that was different

from anything we'd seen,

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There were salt deposits in the hills

and rocks that had been altered by water,

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lt took months of work and struggle,

but ''Spirit'' finally showed us

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there had been water

on both sides of the planet,

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She gave us exactly what we needed,

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These rovers were designed

to last only 90 Mars days,

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and they've already

done many times that,

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They've developed personalities,

They're workhorses, They say:

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''Push us, Ask us to do more,

We can go further, We can go faster,''

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So we ask so much more

than they were ever intended to,

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and to our amazement, they do it,

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