14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at NASA announce that their Martian rover Spirit has now been silent for a full year. At this point, chances of it recovering are dropping every day that passes by, experts say. The Martian spring is already in full swing at its location, and the explorer should have woken up by now.
Over the past few months, experts with the Pasadena, California-based NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have tried a wide variety of approaches for bringing the renowned rover online.
Thus far, everything has failed, even if the day where its location will get the most sunlight this spring has come and passed on the Red Planet. Mission controllers at JPL were hoping that this would mark the day the machine wakes up.
However, the robot emitted no radio signals. Astronomers were listening in with the Deep Space Network antenna, and also with Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), both NASA spacecraft orbiting our neighboring planet.
Though things are looking bleak right now, experts say that they still have some aces up their sleeves, that they could try to apply in order to wake the machine up. Still, Spirit has been silent since March 22, 2010, and its area received most sunlight for this spring on March 10, 2011.
JPL scientists are currently considering the possibility that the rover experienced some damage. The cold temperatures and harsh conditions at its location may have affected its internal clock, or maybe even its communications array.
“Now we've moved into 'There has to be more than one thing wrong with the rover.' So that's the phase we're in right now – trying to see what combination of things could've gone wrong that we can do something about,” says JPL MER project manager John Callas.
The official, who manages both Spirit and its twin Opportunity, says that experts will continue to listen for signals from Spirit until the end of April. If no radio communications are detected by then, then they will give up the search, and officially declare the rover's mission completed.
“Maybe the rover's gone tone-deaf, and it's not hearing our requests to phone home. Or maybe it's mute – it is hearing our requests, but it can't talk to us because its transmitter is bad,” Callas says for Space.
Even if the rover is lost, experts with the JPL are more than satisfied with the run they've had with the robot. Originally scheduled to investigate Mars for about three months, the machine remained operational for more than 6 and a half years.
During this time, it provided massive volumes of data, and helped geologists get a much clearer image of how the ancient Mars looked like. Thanks to data from Spirit and Opportunity, we now know for sure that the Red Planet had water on its surface as recently as 1 billion years ago.