14 DAY TRIAL // While most people feel sorry that Spirit was recently declared a stationary science platform, not everyone is complaining. In fact, there are some experts that have been involved in operating the resilient robot on the surface of the Red Planet for the last 65 years who say that now they have a chance to finally conduct scientific studies that were impossible to carry out before, due to the fact that the robot was moving. Space reports that it's only now that this array of research will become possible.
“There's actually a whole class of scientific objectives that you can only address from a vehicle that doesn't move. So far we've pretty much tended to ignore those,” the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission – which includes Spirit and its twin Opportunity –, Steven Squyres, explains. The expert is based at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. At this point, however, there will be no science conducted on the machine, as engineers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are working around the clock to prepare it for the upcoming Martian winter.
Spirit is currently perched on a 12-degree slope, where it has remained blocked in a patch of loose soil called Troy since last May. It was climbing the slope to get to Home Plate, an elevated region of the Gusev crater, where the rover had been investigating the terrain for more than six Earth years. Now, though it's stuck, the machine can still use its four operational wheels to reposition itself so as to benefit from the largest amount of sunlight possible, during the upcoming winter. Temperatures tend to dip very low on Mars during the long months of coldness, and experts want to take no chances.
Already, the two MER components have endured way past their originally planned expire date. They were supposed to last for only three months investigating Mars, and that was in 2004. JPL scientists say that Spirit and Opportunity provided us with the same amount of knowledge and data that would have taken more than 25 individual, three-month missions to compile. “Energy is getting so low that we think we only have, you know, at maximum another half-dozen drives to be able to do that before we have to hunker down and get through the winter campaign,” Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL) science team member Ray Arvidson explains.
Once the winter months pass, Spirit will start conducting new surveys of the area it will inhabit for the rest of its life. It will also focus on the meteorological aspect of its mission, and will investigate the skies, as well as the peculiar soils it finds itself in. If it manages to survive this Martian winter, and chances are that it will, then we could expect to see a lot more science data flowing from the resilient robot in the coming years.