22 Jan 2004
Rover suffers anomaly on Martian surface
A reader alerts me that the temporary loss of contact with the Mars rover may not be so temporary. That’s disappointing. As my reader writes:
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I haven’t been blogging about space as much as I should be. So many opinions. So little time.
Anyway, even if the rover is lost, the mission was not a total failure. Sending probes to Mars has always been a dicey proposition, even when NASA can convert metric measurements. The second rover, Opportunity, lands on Saturday. Hopefully, meaningful contact with Spirit can be reestablished by then.
UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this I received an email from the Space Store that contained an advertisement for the new book The Amazing Adventures of Spirit & Opportunity. It appears that Spirit’s adventure may not be as amazing as everyone was hoping. Maybe they should have waited until after the adventures were completed.
January 22nd, 2004 at 7:28 pm
They got a ‘ping’ back from an emergency attempt so it may be a need to reboot. Damn Microsoft operating systems! Next communications attempt around 7:10 PM Pacific, so keep your fingers crossed. BTW, I’m doing a lot of space-related blogging, so you could point them my way…