End of the Road For NASA's Mars Rover? 181
An anonymous reader writes "NASA celebrated Mars rover Spirit's bountiful, six-year stint on the red planet on Sunday – way longer than its forecast three-month mission. But it all may soon come to an end, stuck as it is in Martian sand."
look on the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
some exoarcheology student in a couple hundred years is going to make the find of his life
End of the Road (Score:2, Funny)
Late-Breaking News from the Council: VICTORY! (Score:5, Funny)
Today the Council of Elders confirmed the rumours that the sinister blue planet third from our star has waved the white flag of surrender regarding one of its mechanical invaders. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, reported the leak of an intelligence report from the blue world:
http://planetary.org/news/2010/1231_Mars_Exploration_Rovers_Update_Spirit.html [planetary.org]
Continuing his pronouncement, K'Breel continued: "The trap which we laid for the robotic invader has proven successful; the monstrosity from the blue world now lies half-buried in a Snarpat pit, impaled upon a spire of rock."
"Rejoice, podmates, one invader has been immobilized, and even as I speak to you, our teams are dutifully hunting down the second. It is of identical design as to the first, and we anticipate that it will succumb long before it reaches its destination!"
When a junior analyst suggested that both invaders had already exceeded their designed lifetimes by a factor of ten, and that even the immobilized one was one gust of wind away from being able to return operationally-useful scientific data from its current position for years to come, K'Breel had the analyst's gelsacs placed between the invader's slowly-spinning wheel and the crusty sulfates of Scamander Crater.
How to make a 3 month stint last 6 years (Score:2, Funny)
Have you ever landed a dream job with dream pay, only to realize it is just a 3 month contract? What do you do to extend it, and for how long can you do that?
Here are the rules:
1. Dont brake anything you need to do your job.
2. Do everything really slow. And I mean really slow:
-Tell your boss it will take 6 month to make a right turn.
-Be a hero when you are able to do it in 3 months, stop the vehicle, take a lot of pictures, have some discussions, test the right turn in a sandbox, discuss more etc.
3. Never take any risks. Test anything you plan to do in a sandbox again and again. It is actually fun to drive an RC car. If the car is stuck, you are unemployed. To the public, call it mission risk management. To your wife, call it food on the table management.
Have fun
Spirit to NASA (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Spoiler: Why it's dying; emits one last factoid (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What happened to their plan from a few days ago (Score:4, Funny)
It seems to me that the simplest solution would be to send a manned mission and have the astronauts follow the rovers around with a rag and a bottle of windex.
Re:Spoiler: Why it's dying; emits one last factoid (Score:3, Funny)
"A few extra actuators and a bottle of Windex", snarkiness aside
Lighten up. It was a joke. On the other hand, if I had suggested adding an extra roll of duct tape to the mission payload, that would have been a clue that I was making a serious suggestion because duct tape can solve any problem.