Upcoming Winter on Mars
Now that the sun is not constantly above the horizon at our landing site we are generating less power every sol,” said Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “When we landed in late May, and through much of our mission, we generated about 3,500 watt-hours every sol [or Martian day]. We are currently at about 2,500 watt-hours, and sinking daily. With the remaining sols we need to scurry to squeeze the last bit of science out of the mission.”
With the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and the Phoenix Lander all dependent on the solar rays for energy, the upcoming Martian winter is still being processed in the work of the rovers. Meanwhile, the Phoenix lander is still working on the Martian soil as a robotic geologist as long as it has enough energy to do so—located on the northern plain of Mars.
With the Phoenix Mission in the middle of their added one-month extension, the two rovers are finishing their winter on Mars while the lander rushes about, filling its onboard instruments with samples of Martian dirt before it runs out of solar energy.
Almost five years since its original landing, the two popular rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are still on the Martian road again with lots of travel stories to show for years of work and exhausting winters on Mars. With Opportunity leaving its year-long home—Victoria Crater—it is onto the Martian plains for another go-round’ of hard work and lots of incoming data.
Of course it needs to leave the Victoria Crater behind first, with the last couple of days being spent “trying to reach a patch of dust between two crests of ridge surrounding ‘Victoria Crater’ “. The wheels of Opportunity have developed excessive slipping once it reached the staging position.
Meanwhile, the rover Spirit is using less energy to stay warm, previously needing approximately 90 watt-hours to run its heaters whereas now it uses around 30 to 40 watt-hours. This extra energy has allowed the rover to add more images to its winter surroundings, referred to as the “Bonestell panorama.” And now the team leaders will have Spirit use its “miniature thermal emission spectrometer” for the first time in several months, since its last usage on May 21, 2008. Presently the team had the little rover calibrate the spectrometer in order to observe the sky and ground.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under Mission History, Space Agency News, Uncategorized. 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.
