Editorial: That’s the ‘Spirit’

Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004 | 8:38 a.m.

On a planet 106 million miles away where the temperature is about 100 degrees below zero, and in a 4-billion year-old crater the size of Connecticut that may once have held water and harbored life, sits the Spirit rover. Soon our world will be seeing what it sees -- the Martian landscape in unprecedented detail. If all goes as well as it has so far, color pictures will be streaming from the rover this week. When it's able to become mobile -- scientists say in eight or nine days -- we will be able to enjoy more than views. We'll be able to learn more about the red planet's rocks, soil, dust, weather and air.

Our past missions have shown us a sterile planet but we have now landed in another area, one whose geography and geology will give us far more information. The next few months will be exciting as Spirit is joined by Opportunity, its sister rover that is scheduled for a Jan. 24 landing. Mars as the setting for tales of fiction has always been fascinating. As the setting for nonfiction, it is exhilarating.

NASA's success in landing the Spirit rover intact and with nearly pinpoint accuracy reinvigorates our interest in space travel. Once again, as with the landings of the Viking I and II landers in 1975, and the Pathfinder lander and Sojourner rover in 1997, we can imagine what we'll learn and we can enjoy the anticipation that each day of exploration brings. Will this mission find any evidence that the planet once held water -- and life?