Spirit Heads to Safety as Winter Nears
“Right now we’ve got a really dirty rover,” says rover chief scientist Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US. “And we can’t count on a gust of wind to wipe it off,” he adds, explaining that the region of Mars where Spirit is exploring usually has no wind, although there are occasional strong gusts. The situation is very different at its twin Opportunity’s site on the opposite side of the planet – there, lots of little wind gusts are constantly cleaning the rover. (Space.New Scientist.com)
Three winters into the Martian landscape, the rover Spirit is preparing to ride out the upcoming weather crisis on the red planet. Still coated from the July and August severe dust storms, Spirit is slowly making its way toward a northern-tilting slope in order to allow the little rover to maximize the sunlight–to benefit its power-producing solar panels.
Dust has always been an expected obstacle for Spirt, in addition to Opportunity, and was surmised to limit the life expectancy of the twin rovers. But cold Martian nights in the winter require the electronic innards of the rovers to stay warm, which is limited during the winter without enough sunlight as power. And of the two rovers, Spirit survives in the worse of the winter due to being in a the darker and colder environments because of being located further south of the equator. So far, the gusts of winds have been able to clean off the solar panels of the rovers at times, which as allowed them to stay so long on Mars instead of the original 90 days.
Winter is a worry for NASA engineers with so many part failures on the twin rovers. Spirit’s right front wheel seized up in March of 2006 because of a broken motor. Since that date, Spirit has been driven in continuous reverse while dragging along the dead wheel to fulfill its Martian obligations. Like Opportunity, the other twin has been having issues with its encoder system regarding the rock grinding tools—and lately, Spirit’s grinder encoder stopped completely, which forced the NASA rover team to implement another software fix.
The location the NASA rover team has decided on is toward the northern end of Home Plate, with steeper slopes of 25 degrees, as compared to closer slopes of only 20 degrees. The 5 degrees difference will provide to the little rover an additional 10-watts of power per Martian day. This could mean the difference between survival for Spirit and not surviving the cold, dark Martian winters. Because at the present time Spirit’s solar panels have an excessive amount of dust on them from the storms from late June to August.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 11:47 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News. 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.
