The Martian Spirit vehicle has been stuck in a sand dune for many months, and now it faces a new challenge - the Martian winter. The engineers at JPL are making every effort to make it survive
In a few days the robot Spirit will mark six incredible years on Mars. However, in a JPL press release, it seems that Spirit's future is not so good. The robotic vehicle is stuck in a sand trap with wheels that do not function well and interfere with the vehicle's mobility and prevent the vehicle operators from carrying out a strategic action - to point the Spirit's solar collectors towards the sun to fill its batteries for heating in the harsh humid winter. "The first priority for this mission is to remain mobile, if possible," said Steve Squires, the Mars Rover's principal investigator.
"I still hope that the vehicle team will be able to perform another miracle and that 2010 will be a good year for Spirit on Mars." Squires said.
But if mobility is not possible, the next priority will be survival. To do this, the team will try to improve the vehicle's slope without compromising the Spirit's ability to generate enough electricity to turn its wheels. Spirit is in the southern hemisphere of Mars, where it is autumn and the amount of daylight hours available to the vehicle's solar panels is decreasing. This may be expressed in the creation of rescue attempts from the stuck place during January, depending on the amount of power that will remain. The inclination of the spirit, almost five degrees towards the south, is not good because the winter sun passes low in the northern sky.
Unless there is an improvement in the inclination of the vehicle or luck with winds that will affect the gradual build-up of dust on the solar collectors, the amount of sunlight will continue to decrease until May 2010. In May, or perhaps even earlier, Spirit will not have enough power left to maintain an active state.
"At the current rate of dust accretion, zero-inclination solar inputs will provide barely enough energy to power the survival heaters on the Martian winter solstice." said Jennifer Herman, a vehicle engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
The team is also evaluating strategies to improve inclination even if Spirit can't get out of the sand trap, such as digging deeper with the wheels facing north. In February, NASA will evaluate the scientific potential of Mars missions, including SPIRIT, and determine how to distribute the limited resources. In the meantime, the team is planning more studies that Spirit can do in its stationary state and its dwindling power.
"Spirit will be able to continue scientific research where it is," said Ray Arbidson of Washington University in St. Louis, the vehicles' deputy principal investigator. "We can explore the interior of Mars, monitor the weather and try to continue exploring the interesting resources uncovered by the Spirit's wheels."
Exploring the planet's interior using radio transmissions to measure the wobble of Mars' spin axis, which is not possible when the vehicle is in motion. This experiment and others may provide different findings from a task that has so far achieved its expectations and even beyond.
9 תגובות
By the way, why send something organic? What is the connection? And why a hedgehog?
4, It seems to me that the very strong wind on Mars is the one that NASA relied on to clear the dust from the solar collectors.
It's really sad that Spirit is disabled, the end of a long road, the scientists/programmers who operated it on Mars to this day must be really depressed about it. I saw a program about Spirit and Operative where they showed how each team became very attached to their robot.
to 6 Maybe a hedgehog?
Maybe we should also send something organic there, some tree
To 4
NASA did not think that the robots would survive that long, to be honest the mission was originally not supposed to last more than three months.
Really smart people couldn't install wipers for solar collectors!?
In my opinion, everything possible should be done to help Spirit
Also, we need to drop another cheap robot on the planet just so that it can repair and replace the batteries for the Spirit
Spirit and Opportunity have done more than enough to win this kind of support
I thought those robots were disabled a long time ago...
Speaking of which, what happens with the second vehicle that has not been in the news for a long time