It may be odd to talk about the wintertime blues in the height of summer, but Spirit has a pretty good case of them, sitting as it is on a Martian hill, dimly lit by the pale sun. For weeks, engineers and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., have been coaching the rover up and over and around rocks and ledges and slopes in an attempt to position Spirit on top of a relatively flat slice of bedrock that faces north