Wednesday, May 25, 2011

bye bye spirit rover. over and out.

i'm a little sad to report that today, humans will stop trying to contact one of my favorite robots, the mars rover named spirit.


the last signal NASA received from the cute little roving robot was over a year ago, on march 22, 2010, and it seems that there is no longer hope of revival.

the primary mission of the robot geologist was to find clues to past water activity on mars by searching for different types of rocks and soil, and to those ends it has been quite successful. my favorite discovery, though, was the martian blueberries!

anyway, while it's sad to say goodbye, we can still be amazed to remember that when spirit landed on mars on the 3rd of january 2004,, it was scheduled for a mission of only three months, and instead it lasted SIX YEARS! thats pretty amazing, especially considering spirit's twin rover opportunity is still truckin'!

here's some more info from our sixty symbols video on mars:

3 comments:

heroineworshipper said...

The chance of wind cleaning the solar arrays bought a lot of time that won't exist with MSL. MSL uses a nuclear power supply which is going to die in 2 years, no matter what.

skywatcher88 said...

Yes tis a sad day for the little martian buggy that could!
Do I sense a lyric brewing about Spirit rover?
I am thinking of the Tune Ashokan Farewell by Jay Ungar as a nice tribute to the spirit of Spirit !
Peace and clear skies!
7718

angelrls, El Lobo Rayado said...

Ey! That is you talking in the video! You're full of surprises! I'm linking it from my blog, yesterday I also talked about Spirit. And Happy birthday again!