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Wednesday May 20, 2009
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The Spirit Mars rover has been stuck in the red planet's soil for a couple of weeks, so NASA is trying out a bunch of procedures--some involving other Mars craft--in order to figure out how to best extract Spirit from its predicament.
The problem: one of Spirit's wheels stalled out, and the other wheels dug themselves in part of the way. The trick is to avoid sinking the rover further to the point where the belly pan is touching the soil, according to Space.com.
The report said that initially the Mars project team was worried that the left-middle wheel had jammed, but a recent diagnostic test of the motor on May 16th proved that its electrical resistance was within normal operating range, indicating that the motor is probably fine.
"This is not a full exoneration of the wheel, but it is encouraging," said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, in the article. "We're taking incremental steps. Next, we'll command that wheel to rotate a degree or two. The other wheels will be kept motionless, so this is not expected to alter the position of the vehicle."
In the meantime, the team is using Spirit's extra power--gleaned from additional recent wind gusts that cleaned off the solar panels--to communicate with the Odyssey orbiter and relay additional test data. That's helping the Spirit team construct a simulation back down on Earth. It may be a few more weeks before they actually try something out, though.
This reminds me of a lecture Steve Squyres, the original project lead for the two rovers, gave at the American Museum of Natural History a few years ago. He had said that sometimes the way out for a stuck rover is to just "floor it." This time around, several weeks of testing and simulation running may well prove the same thing again.
Posted By:
Jamie Lendino
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