The Mars “Spirit” Rover, is celebrating its five year anniversary. It was only supposed to operate for three months.
These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day,” said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“We realise that a major rover component on either vehicle could fail at any time and end a mission with no advance notice, but on the other hand, we could accomplish the equivalent duration of four more prime missions on each rover in the year ahead.”
Together, the rovers have driven more than 20km, and returned more than 36 gigabytes of data. This has included a quarter of a million images.
Spirit is exploring a 150km-wide bowl-shaped depression known as Gusev Crater. It has found an abundance of rocks and soils bearing evidence of extensive exposure to water. Opportunity is on the other side of the planet, in a flat region known as Meridiani Planum.
The two rovers are showing their age, but continue to push on. Because of a jammed wheel, Spirit has to drive backwards to go anywhere — but wheel scraping revealed some valuable info about minerals just below the surface dust.
When NASA manages to do something right, the results are amazing. Spirit and its sister, Opportunity, will have the Mars surface to themselves for a while, though — as both NASA and ESA have both postponed their next Mars probes due to budget issues.
See also: NASA – Mars Rovers Near Five Years of Science and Discovery
I know that it’s really expensive, but this is what you get when you do all the engineering, fabrication and assembly work on Wednesdays.
I know that it’s really expensive, but this is what you get when you do all the engineering, fabrication and assembly work on Wednesdays.