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Mars Rover "Spirit" In Danger
Riding with Robots writes "Just days after announcing that the Mars Phoenix Lander has met its icy demise, NASA reports that a dust storm has left the rover Spirit on the edge of power failure. During one recent Martian day, the robotic geologist's solar array produced only 89 watt hours of energy, the lowest output by either rover in their nearly five years on Mars. Mission managers are taking steps to protect the hardy, battle-worn spacecraft, but the agency describes Spirit's status as 'vulnerable.'"
Both rovers were designed for a 90 Mars day (sol) mission. The difference between Earth days and Mars days is that sols are 24.6 hours long. Opportunity is on Sol 1710 or so and Spirit is on Sol 1730. Both rovers have lasted almost 20 times longer than originally designed.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The Planetary Society blog has a composite picture of Spirit from two years ago and today which shows starkly just how much dust has accumulated.
The two rovers were not designed to work for 90 days.
They were guaranteed to work for 90 days.
The various components were designed to work no matter what they experienced for 90 days on the Martian surface.
I suspect that they were designed for the worst possible set of circumstances for 90 days which has allowed them to operate for the much longer time in the actual environment which is more benign than the worst case scenario.
Regardless of the semantics of the 90 days, the time the two robots have been operating is still an amazing achievement and everybody involved should be very proud.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter