Mars Rover dead. :(

[Jason Thompson]

Mars rover Spirit is dead.

It seems that NASA has accepted that the Mars Rover Spirit, silent now for several months, may in fact be dead. It's a shame, but what an amazing run that little rover had. She was designed for a three month mission but gave us six years of operation. A 2400% increase in output is not to be sniffed at!

Let's hope her sister, Opportunity, continues for even longer.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

I think one of them was getting a build up of dust on the solar panels which was making it constantly weaker. What with Mars not being known for it's abundance of barmy Sunshine ... But yeah, I've an excellent book "postcards from Mars" of some of the amazing photos they sent back.

[Rob McCow]

It's weird to think of that Rover, sitting there all alone on the Martian landscape, doing exactly nothing. If we could only reach it, perhaps we could fix whatever fault it is in five minutes!

[Jason Thompson]

A nice thought, but the dust and the freezing it has endured now with no power to warm itself will almost certainly have killed it beyond repair.

The dust on the solar panels was originally why no-one expected them to last more than a couple of months on the surface. What no-one anticipated was that the occasional dust storm would actually clean the panels and leave them as good as new for generating power.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Ahem... wipers?

[Jason Thompson]

Wipers were considered, but the added weight and complexity ruled them out. They were not considered worthwhile since, in order to put wipers in, some scientific instruments would have to be deleted. And further, the wipers would simply scrape the dust over the panels, scratching them and reducing their efficiency. The irony here is that the rovers would actually have died sooner with wipers than they have lasted without them.

[Dirk Gently]

I wonder if anyone has thought about putting a small quantity of water & bacteria on Mars to see what would happen.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

I believe that's "outlawed" by an international agreement for the time being.

Well, the bacteria anyway.

[Jason Thompson]

Indeed. Internatinoal agreements currently preclude the biological contamination of any celestial body. These things are assembled in clean rooms. The Galileo probe was instructed to crash into jupiter specifically to avoid accidentally contaminating any of its moons.

Putting water on Mars is rather hard anyway. The atmospheric pressure there is so low that water cannot exist in liquid form on the surface except at one or two specific locations at very specific times of the year.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

One amusing thing - I remember a docu on the teams running the rovers, they have to keep to "a Martian day" over Earth day.

Mars day is about 25 hours, which means over a month they've cycled completely out of phase ...

[Jason Thompson]

Yup. 24 hours and 37 minutes make up one Martian day (which is god news for any future colonisation, as adaptation to a Martian day over an Earth day won't be difficult). They refer to them as 'sols'. Of course if they didn't do this they'd find themselves eventually coming to work during the Martian night, which is pointless as the rover can't see where it's going in the dark....

[WhiteCrowNZ]

Actually I bet it's more difficult that that - as of course according to the relative position between the Earth and Mars, it can change this +/- about an hour.

Interested to find in all this time the rover has moved about 5 miles, which doesnt seem much.

The second Rover is about 5 miles from its next objective, which it expects to reach in about Sept?