A historic milestone could be made on Mars this week.
On Thursday, NASA’s beleaguered Spirit rover could become the longest-running mission on the surface of Mars, surpassing the Viking 1 lander’s record of six years and 116 days of operation on the Martian surface — if it’s still alive, that is.
Spirit fell silent on Mars on March 31, when it skipped a planned communications session with Earth. It may be hibernating through the harsh Martian winter. But even if Spirit doesn’t survive, its robotic twin Opportunity is poised to break the Mars mission record in early May. Beating Viking’s record, which NASA set in the 1980s, would be a major feat for a rover the size of a golf cart that was only supposed to last for three months and spent the past year stuck in Martian sand. The milestone would also be a welcome surprise to the team of scientists and engineers that have been commanding Spirit for these past six years.
Mars Rovers Set to Break Red Planet Record
Mars Rover Finds Weird Rocks, Hits 20-Km Marker
With new software that allows Opportunity to photograph rocks and other aspects of the Martian terrain and decide for itself what is worth closer inspection, the rover took an up-close look at a few rocks ejected by the impact that created Concepción.
What Opportunity has seen are chunks of the same type of bedrock it has seen at hundreds of locations since landing in January 2004: soft, sulfate-rich sandstone holding harder peppercorn-size dark spheres like berries in a muffin. The little spheres, rich in iron, gained the nickname “blueberries.” But these rocks have some unusual twists as well.
“It was clear from the images that Opportunity took on the approach to Concepción that there was strange stuff on lots of the rocks near the crater,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit. “There’s dark, grayish material coating faces of the rocks and filling fractures in them. At least part of it is composed of blueberries jammed together as close as you could pack them. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
NASA Mars rover team receives an award
NASA says the team that operates its Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity will receive the 2010 International Space Ops Award for Outstanding Achievement.
The space agency said the citation for the award, to be presented April 29 in Huntsville, Ala., says: “For remarkable success in meeting unique and varied challenges of operating a rover on Mars and establishing a model for future in-situ operations.”
The award is presented every two years, with the recipient selected from members of several nations’ space agencies.
Mars Rover Gets Mind of Its Own
NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity is getting a chance to call its own science shots on the red planet.
New software uploaded to the intrepid robot now allows Opportunity to make its own decisions about whether or not to make additional observations of Mars rocks it spots when it arrives at a new location.
The rover has already taken its first automated images of Martian rocks to test out how well the new program works. “It’s a way to get some bonus science,” said rover driver Tara Estlin of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., also a member of JPL’s Artificial Intelligence Group, which developed the new software.
MRO Sees Opportunity on the Edge of Concepcion Crater (and more!) Universe Today
This image shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity perched on the edge of Concepción Crater in Meridiani Planum, Mars. This image was taken by HiRISE on February 13, 2010, on sol 2153 of Opportunity’s mission on Mars. If you look closely, you can see rover tracks in the ripples to the north and northwest of the rover! Wow! See below for a wonderful colorized close-up version by Stu Atkinson that shows the tracks very clearly. Scientists use these high-resolution images (about 25 cm/pixel) to help navigate the rover. In addition, rover exploration of areas covered by such high-resolution images provides “ground truth” for the orbital data. Oppy has moved along from Concepcion and is now heading towards a set of twin craters. You can check out Stu’s blog Road to Endeavour to see what Opportunity is seeing these days. One milestone (meterstone?) Oppy recently reached was hitting 20 km on her odometer and she seems to continue to be in great operating condition. Go Opportunity!
Mars rover Spirit could rise again New Scientist
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.
NASA Putting Mars Rover To Sleep To Save Money Jalopnik
Although it might seem like a headline from The Onion, the story’s actually true. NASA’s being forced to cut four million dollars from the Mars rover project. In order to meet that requirement, they’ll have to put one rover, Spirit, to sleep — a “hibernation” period. The team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) will also have to put the other rover, Opportunity, on a diminished work cycle. But in actuality, they won’t be cutting what Opportunity’s doing — they’ll just be spreading it out over a longer period of time.
Spirit’s Last Moves Before Winter JPL
Recent drives by the Spirit rover from Jan. 14 to Feb. 4, 2010 (Sols 2145 to 2165) moved the center of the rover approximately 13.4 inches (34 centimeters) backwards. Since Jan 26 (sol 2157), drive commands have concentrated on placing Spirit into a favorable tilt toward the sun as the Martian winter approaches.
Stuck Rover on Mars Can Still Do Science
NASA’s beleaguered Mars rover Spirit may no longer be much of a rover, but it’s not the end of the road for her yet. The semi-stuck robot still has plenty of science left to do on the red planet, mission scientists say.
“There’s actually a whole class of scientific objectives that you can only address from a vehicle that doesn’t move. So far we’ve pretty much tended to ignore those,” said rover mission principal investigator Steven Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Squyres and other mission mangers announced last week that they were halting the effort to free Spirit from the sand trap it has been stuck in since May and shifting efforts to preparing the rover for the upcoming Martian winter.
The rover’s handlers will try over the next week to position the rover to maximize the amount of solar radiation it receives to give it the best chance of making it through the winter.
“Energy is getting so low that we think we only have, you know, at maximum another half-dozen drives to be able to do that before we have to hunker down and get through the winter campaign,” said science team member Ray Arvidson of the Washington University in St. Louis.
That winter campaign won’t see the rover doing much: “In the dead of winter, it can try to survive, that’s about it,” Arvidson told SPACE.com.
Martian Winter Threatens NASA Rover Information Week
NASA plans to attempt a series of tricky maneuvers to save the Spirit Mars Rover from the Red Planet’s oncoming winter. Spirit is stuck in the sand on Mars’ surface, and all of NASA’s attempts to free it by remote control have failed to date.
Now, the space agency says the best it can do is redirect the vehicle’s solar panels so it can generate enough electricity to make it through the winter and remain in contact with Earth.