The Mars rover Spirit has drilled a hole in a rock on the Red Planet, marking the robot's return to full health and the first time a rover has deliberately carved Martian rock.
The rover's drill made a circular, 2.65 millimetre-deep hole in a rock nicknamed Adirondack by scientists, according to information on the mission's Web site posted late on Friday.
"When we saw virtually a complete circle, I was thrilled beyond anything I could have ever dreamed," said Steve Gorevan, who led the team at New York-based Honeybee Robotics, which designed the drill. "With the ... cutting parameters we set, I didn't think it would cut this deep."
The onboard computers of the golf cart-sized rover malfunctioned shortly after it landed on January 3. On Wednesday, engineers erased and reformatted Spirit's flash memory - used to store photographs for transmission - after it became overloaded.
Spirit returned to full-time science on Thursday. Its twin, Opportunity, is on the opposite side of Mars, where it is examining an outcropping of bedrock.