Spirit’s Swan Song?
In a press release that seems to have pretty much been meant to fly under the radar, NASA admits its failure in the attempt to free Spirit from the sand trap she drove into last (Earth) spring, despite the encouraging results of their latest strategy, because Martian winter is quickly approaching and the amount of energy available to the rover is becoming insufficient for further attempts.
In fact, the poor rover’s current tilt and the amount of dust gathered on her solar panels make her unlikely to survive the Martian winter, operations potentially stopping as early as April. So NASA engineers are sacrificing any further extrication attempts in order to attempt improving Spirit’s tilt, possibly by making her dig herself deeper into the sand trap, so she will receive more of the precious winter sunlight, which would allow her to turn on her heaters and perhaps also certain other components as needed in order to withstand the harsh Martian winter, and hopefully also be able to communicate with Earth once every few days for status updates and potential error corrections.
Spirit and Opportunity are real heroes among mankind’s creations and it’s really hard not to anthropomorphize them. (You probably noticed that I keep writing “she” when referring to Spirit. I actually tended to say “he” but I noticed that the team uses “she” and I’m trying to adapt.) I wouldn’t want to be a member of Spirit’s dedicated team when she’ll finally stop working. I wouldn’t want to be one of them right now either, when they know their “baby” is in serious trouble and will certainly “die”, even if no other problems will befall her, because she can’t start moving again and her solar panels will eventually be too covered with dust to be able to generate the required energy anymore. And this will only get worse during the Martian winter, when the very low amount of available sunlight and the freezing temperatures mean that the fatal failure could come any day and they may not even realize it, because Spirit could have too little power to attempt communications even if she would otherwise be surviving.
Still, Spirit is currently on sol 2160 of her mission, which was scheduled to last for only 90 sols. That means she has been operational exactly 24 times longer than initially expected and is still doing the best job she can. This would be the equivalent of a car that’s sold with a warranty of five years still functioning 120 years later, without ever being repaired! And since the rovers were designed to cover less than one kilometer at best, Spirit’s total odometry would be equivalent to that same car, with the warranty covering 100000 kilometers, running for over 773000 kilometers, also without any repairs. And Opportunity would be even better, much better, with the equivalent of nearly two million kilometers! It’d sure be nice to see this kind of reliability here on Earth as well…
If this is to be Spirit’s swan song, I can only hope that it will be a long and breathtakingly beautiful one. That means I hope that Spirit will once again prove more than a match for the challenge ahead, surviving the coming Martian winter and then managing to keep the required components and systems in good enough condition for long enough to provide enough data for this final major task they have assigned to her, which is to find out whether Mars’ core is liquid or solid.
I also hope that Opportunity will survive at least until the next rover will land and take over. (Though I still have serious misgivings about that next rover because of the nuclear power generator it will carry. Eventually leaving nuclear waste in the open seems like an awfully bad idea to me, even if it will be done on what seems to be a dead planet. Plus that there’s no way that power supply will last for significantly longer than the amount of time it’s designed for.) And then, while I’m at it, I also hope that once we’ll colonize Mars, which will preferably only happen after we’d have learned how to properly take care of Earth, these rovers will be recovered and receive all the attention they deserve as treasured exhibits of the most important Martian science museum.
Otherwise, I also truly hope space exploration will receive the full support it needs, including funding, from now on. Especially since it appears that all of NASA’s Mars programs will be reviewed in February in order to determine which can be maintained considering the extremely limited resources that are still available to the agency, after significant and repeated budget cuts over the past several years. I’d really hate to see these rovers being abandoned due to lack of funding before they actually cease to function. But, more than that, it should be obvious that space exploration, at least until we’ll be able to colonize other planets and other interests will unfortunately come into play, is an excellent source of pure and unbiased knowledge. And knowledge is at least the second most important thing money can buy, and often even the most important…
In the end, I’d just like to point out today’s issue of xkcd, called simply “Spirit“. Quite touching, isn’t it? And I very much agree with the underlying message: Spirit didn’t fail us, so we must not fail her either. Even if we’re only talking about a robot…
And there’s one more thing to add, though several have already said it on the official thread for this issue on the xkcd forum: Little Spirit, you are home! We are the ones who need to come over, as soon as we’ll be ready to catch up with you. Though, again, I have to add that I hope we’ll only do that after we’ll finally learn to use our abilities to create and heal instead of harming and destroying. Because these twins prove what we can do when we truly put our hearts and minds into it.
