NASA Mars Rover Spirit May Move Forward By Spinning Its Wheels

coondoggie writes "As NASA celebrates its Mars rover Spirit's sixth anniversary exploring the red planet, it is hunting for a way to keep the machine, which is mired in a sand trap, alive to see a seventh year. On its Web site, the space agency this week noted there may indeed be such an option. That option would be spinning the wheels on the north side of Spirit, letting it dig in deeper in the Martian sand but at the same time improving the tilt of the rover's solar panels toward the Sun."

Comments

Re:Let's start digging then...

[Geoffrey.landis]

The difference is that winter is coming, and the sun gets low on the horizon. We can, if we chose, dig in on one side so that we tilt toward the sun, which means that we will get more solar energy, and so the solar powered rover will survive the winter.

(We've tilted the rover into the sun every winter so far-- if we don't, this will be the first winter we've tried to survive without tilting into the sun)

Re:And one should add

[Osmosis_Garett]

Actually, Opportunity is examining the damaged heat shield from re-entry, which it just arrived at the other day.

Re:Design

[MobyDisk]

I really hope you are joking.

If not, you saying that that a rover that survived for 8 years, that was supposed to only survive 90 days - was poorly designed. Oh, and NASA should have known about this problem (based on all the other rovers we've sent over the years) and added a complicated jacking mechanism and bigger wheels. And I guess, if in 20 years it gets attacked by aliens someone will post "oh, and they should have seen this coming and added laser defenses."