Spirit dead? Or just sleeping?

[n2doc]

Despite NASA's several attempts to make a connection to the rover, Spirit remains frozen in silence.

Thu Apr 1, 2010 06:06 AM ET | content provided by John Antczak, Associated Press

An artist's concept portrays a NASA Mars Exploration Rover on the surface of Mars.
NASA/JPL/Cornell University
The aging, sand-trapped Mars rover Spirit failed to make a scheduled communication this week and may have gone into a power-saving hibernation to survive the Red Planet's winter, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Wednesday.

Spirit had been expected to communicate with the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft on Tuesday.

"We are checking other less likely possibilities for the missed communication, but this probably means that Spirit tripped a low-power fault sometime between the last downlink on March 22 and yesterday," Mars rovers project manager John Callas said in a statement.

Operating on Mars since 2004, Spirit survived previous winters by positioning itself with its solar panels tilted toward the sun. But it has been stuck in sand for nearly a full Earth year, and with two of its six wheels not working, NASA decided in January to leave it be and use it for stationary science.

The amount of sunlight falling on its dusty solar panels is now declining.

http://news.discovery.com/space/mars-rover-spirit-not-responding-nasa.html

[Ian David]

1. It's pining for the fjords. n/t