Options Dwindling For Mars Spirit Rover

coondoggie writes "NASA says it is narrowing a short list of things its scientists can do to extricate its stuck Mars Spirit rover. They are exploring a couple remaining options, such as driving backwards and using Spirit's robotic arm to sculpt the ground directly in front of the left-front wheel, the only working wheel the arm can reach. The amount of energy that Spirit harvests each day, however, is declining, as autumn days shorten on southern Mars. 'At the current rate of dust accumulation, solar arrays at zero tilt would provide barely enough energy to run the survival heaters through the Mars winter solstice.' NASA is currently analyzing results of a Jan. 13th attempt to move the spacecraft that involved a very slow rotation of the wheels. Earlier drives in the past two weeks using wheel wiggles and slow wheel rotation produced negligible progress toward extricating Spirit, NASA stated."

Comments

Re:Where is Opportunity ?

[Spatial]

Opportunity landed on the other side of the planet. Although I don't know where it is right now, it's unlikely to be close given the fairly low speed of the rovers and the scientific value of maximising the survey area.


Also, I'm surprised Slashdot didn't go with Opportunities Dwindling For Mars Spirit Rover.

Punalicious.

Re:Where is Opportunity ?

[wooferhound]

Here is the actual Nasa Mars Rover site . . .
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/home/index.html

Re:Where is Opportunity ?

[petermgreen]

The problem for spirit as I understand it is they really need to be tilted towards the sun (or at minimum be at zero tilt) to maintain survival power levels through the winter and right now they are tilted away from the sun.

normally this would be achieved by driving to a location that is tilted correctly for overwintering but they can't do that if they are stuck.

They are considering digging one side of sprint in further to get a more favourable tilt but if they do that it will almost certainly mean the rover will never move again.