![]() He said the signal from a stationary Spirit could be tracked very accurately, to measure how much Mars wobbles on its axis. "We have to be prepared to go through a period where we are not hearing from the rover for an extended length of time."įar from being downbeat, Professor Steve Squyres, the rover's principal investigator, expressed some excitement at the scientific possibilities of a static vehicle. "The rover will be like a polar bear, hibernating and it could be for many months - of the order of six months," explained John Callas, Spirit's project manager at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It will not emerge from that state until August or September, when the Sun gets high enough in the Martian sky to power up the rover's systems. Engineers have a plan to rock the vehicle back and forth to acquire a more favourable posture.Įven so, it is likely Spirit will maintain so little energy in its batteries that it will go into hibernation, perhaps as soon as April. Instead, the mission team is concentrating on trying to get the rover tilted in a manner that will maximise the amount of sunlight falling on its solar panels during the approaching winter months. Without the additional traction, the agency now accepts that further efforts to try to escape the soft soil will be fruitless. The robot's predicament has been exacerbated by the failure of two of its six wheels. Spirit will continue to make contributions to science." "But this is not a day to mourn Spirit this is not a day of loss at this point. "Spirit has encountered a golfer's worst nightmare - the sand trap that no matter how many strokes you take, you can't get out of it," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars exploration programme at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC. The robot geologist has taken thousands of images and found evidence in Mars' rocks of a wetter, warmer past. Nasa says Spirit, which landed on the Red Planet just over six years ago, will now live out its remaining days as a static science station. The vehicle became stuck in soft soil back in May last year and all the efforts to extricate it have failed. The US space agency (Nasa) has admitted defeat in its battle to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap. Spirit was given a primary mission on the Red Planet of three months
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