NASA’s Spirit rover should be able to wriggle free of its sandy trap on Mars after all, says a scientist for the mission. But the plucky robotic explorer will need to survive the bitter Martian winter first.
In April 2009, Spirit’s wheels broke through a thin surface crust and got mired in the loose sand below. After months of trying unsuccessfully to free the rover, NASA declared on 26 January that Spirit would henceforth be a stationary lander mission rather than a rover.
But the announcement was “a little bit premature”, rover scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, told researchers at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, on Monday.
In nine drives between 15 January and 8 February, mission members coaxed the rover into driving backwards by 34 centimetres – “pretty good for a lander”, Arvidson said. That far surpasses the mere millimetres of motion Spirit had managed in previous efforts.