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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."
Except we humans are made to walk on ground. We know what to do when standing on something, so such a planet is of value to us.
Bring a few guys to Mars, give them basic tools and here you go: bricks can be made from local material using 5k years old technology, then you get buildings (making them hermetic is merely tricky but not insurmountable), and it's a straight road from there.
But people stuck in a boat on (or in) an ocean of methane? I can't see any obvious way to make such an outpost expand.
Thus, getting that nautical rover of yours would be pure exploration, while a ground vehicle can pave way to getting a foothold in a quite near future.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.