2008 A Year of Rest for the Twin Rover, Spirit
With the dangerous possibility that NASA’s twin rover, Spirit, could drop to dangerous power levels in the Martian dwindling winter sunlight, the NASA team managers are saying that the rover will definitely be on low-exertion work throughout this winter. Spirit’s winter position is at a 15-degree tilt on the north-facing slope of the Home Plate plateau, according to Jim Bell, Cornell associate professor of astronomy and leader of the mission’s Pancam color camera team. Plans had already been made by NASA drivers to move the rover to steeper angles, especially when the sun moves lower and lower in the Martian sky.
Spirit has entered this winter on Mars totally handicapped by dusty solar panels, due to giant Martian dust storms that had developed in June and July. Presently, the rover’s power levels are currently at 290 and 250-watt hours, compared to 100 watt hours being the energy amount needed to light a 100-watt bulb for one hour. Full power for either rover is 800 to 900-watt hours.
Once the exhausted rover had achieved 13 degrees of northern tilt, once it had backed the rear and middle wheels over the north edge of Home Plate, its power levels increased from 260-watt hours on December 15, 2007, to 291-watt hours on December 19, 2007. If it could achieve 16 degrees of tilt, it would be much better for the rover. To achieve this, Spirit’s drivers had it move very slowly farther down the slope to increase the needed northern tilt. On it progress toward Home Plate, the rover could only travel 30 minutes at a time as it had such limited batter power. Worse yet was when it got stuck for two weeks in “Tartarus,” named after a mythological dungeon, before it was loosened and headed toward its safe winter haven.
Now that Spirit is secure and gathering power on its winter slope, some of the low-paced jobs for it this winter are to perform studies that will use its robotic arm–including the microscopic imager, alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer, and Mössbauer spectrometer. The Home Plate area is located in the southern hemisphere of Mars, where Spirit is wintering on a 90-metre-wide raised plateau. It consists mainly of steep, northern-tiling slopes that are beneficial to Spirit as it maximizes the sunlight which falls on the rover’s solar panels
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 2:04 am and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
