Options Dwindling For Mars Spirit Rover 120
coondoggie writes "NASA says it is narrowing a short list of things its scientists can do to extricate its stuck Mars Spirit rover. They are exploring a couple remaining options, such as driving backwards and using Spirit's robotic arm to sculpt the ground directly in front of the left-front wheel, the only working wheel the arm can reach. The amount of energy that Spirit harvests each day, however, is declining, as autumn days shorten on southern Mars. 'At the current rate of dust accumulation, solar arrays at zero tilt would provide barely enough energy to run the survival heaters through the Mars winter solstice.' NASA is currently analyzing results of a Jan. 13th attempt to move the spacecraft that involved a very slow rotation of the wheels. Earlier drives in the past two weeks using wheel wiggles and slow wheel rotation produced negligible progress toward extricating Spirit, NASA stated."
Too bad... (Score:1, Funny)
Send a towtruck. (Score:1, Funny)
What's the big deal?
The Animal (Score:5, Funny)
This problem was solved in the 80's with The Animal: The Animal [youtube.com]
Spirit Rover engineers should have played with more 80's toys. Can anything stop...THE ANIMAL?!
Damnit Wolowitz (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Surely the easiest thing.. (Score:4, Funny)
the easiest thing to do is to send a second robot probe with a tow cable and winch it out.
That's way dumb. Call a local tow operator. Any Earthside tow operator will want to be paid for the mileage. You're paying them to drive 60 million miles each way. At $3 per mile, that's a lot of dough.
Re:fp (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Where is Opportunity ? (Score:2, Funny)
It also keeps them focused on their tasks. If they were together, it's just robot-on-robot sex, 24/7/365...or at least after every sunny day...
Re:Time to say good night. (Score:3, Funny)