Mars Rover Spirit Still Alive

Toren Altair writes with this excerpt from a story at The Space Fellowship: "NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit communicated via the Mars Odyssey orbiter today right at the time when ground controllers had told it to, prompting shouts of 'She's talking!' among the rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 'This means Spirit has not gone into a fault condition and is still being controlled by sequences we send from the ground,' said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity."

Comments

Re:bellows and a nozzle?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

My understanding: The thing that the designers had decided was that the weight of a dust removal system was not worth removing a scientific instrument to do so, because they had a weight and size budget to deal with. They didn't think there was an effective means to clean the dust to extend the lifetime of the rover vs. less data recovered.

Re:NASA Automotives

[Tubal-Cain]

Spirit has gone 4.8 miles so far, and Opportunity has gone 7.68 miles.

links...

[sraviik]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_rover http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_rover and http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/

Re:Fail

[meringuoid]

I realy like the word Imperial better.

Imperial units, which are used in England, aren't the same as English units, which are used in America. All pints in America are 95ml short, although given what's in them that's probably a mercy.