NASA’s Opportunity rover returned the first pictures of its landing site early today, revealing a surreal, dark landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars. Opportunity relayed the images and other data via NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter. The data showed that the spacecraft is healthy, said Matt Wallace, mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Opportunity has touched down in a bizarre, alien landscape,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

The next generation of explorers will get the chance to flex their imaginations during two live distance learning events sponsored by NASA’s Glenn Research Center on Friday, January 23 at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Middle school students from around the country will be able to learn about the past, present and future of Mars exploration, compare conditions on Mars and Earth and discuss barriers to manned space exploration.

Ground controllers were able to send commands to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit early Wednesday and received a simple signal acknowledging that the rover heard them, but they did not receive expected scientific and engineering data during scheduled communication passes during the rest of that martian day.

The first use of the tools on the arm of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit reveals puzzles about the soil it examined and raises anticipation about what the tool will find during its studies of a martian rock.

While their peers sweat out their next geometry quiz, high school students Courtney Dressing and Rafael Morozowski are sweating out the commencement of surface activities with the rest of the Mars Exploration Rover team. Dressing, a sophomore from Virginia, and Morozowski, a senior from Brazil, are members of an international team of students working directly with scientists and engineers overseeing the science payload on the Mars Exploration Rovers. The two 16-year-olds are the first of 16 “Student Astronauts” aged 13 to 17 who, all told, call twelve different nations home. They won their places aboard the Mars Exploration Rover team through an essay contest run by the Planetary Society followed by oral interviews. This is the first time that an international group of young people has been selected through open competition to participate in an active planetary spacecraft mission.

The engineers and scientists for NASA’s Spirit are eager to get the rover off its lander and out exploring the terrain that Spirit’s pictures are revealing, but caution comes first. An added “lift and tuck” to get deflated airbag material out of the way extends the number of activities Spirit needs to finish before it can get its wheels onto martian ground.

As NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers blasted off in Summer 2003 on the risky venture of attempting landings on Mars in January 2004, a rover prototype helped refine navigational software at a unique site on Earth that replicates Martian terrain.

In a perfect world, or in this case two perfect worlds — Earth and Mars, the first of NASA’s two robot geologists will bounce over rocks and roll to a safe stop on the martian surface shortly after 8:35 p.m. PST this Saturday, January 3, 2004.