NASA's Spirit rover reached out with its versatile robotic arm early Friday and examined a patch of fine- grained martian soil with a microscope at the end of the arm. "We made our first use of the arm and took the first microscopic image of the surface of another planet," said Dr. Mark Adler, Spirit mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The rover's microscopic imager, one of four tools on a turret at the end of the arm, serves as the functional equivalent of a field geologist's hand lens for examining structural details of rocks and soils. "I'm elated and relieved at how well things are going. We got some great images in our first day of using the microscopic imager on Mars," said Dr. Ken Herkenhoff of the U.S. Geological Survey Astrogeology