Mars Rover Spirit been up there for a year.
NASA will commemorate Spirit's first year with a full day of programming, news conferences and even a rover birthday cake on NASA TV on Mars beginning at 1:00 p.m. EST (1800 GMT) today.
Spirit continues to return science information from the Columbia Hills, a region more than two miles (3.2 kilometers) from its Gusev Crater landing site. Scouring those hills has given Spirit - and researchers - more evidence that water shaped Mars' past. Meanwhile, on the other side of Mars at Meridiani Planum, Spirit's robotic twin Opportunity is studying its own heat shield while it seeks to dig more details on the area's watery past.
"It's astonishing to me how well it's going," said Steve Squyres, principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project from Cornell University, of the mission in a telephone interview. "They're tough machines built by a fantastic team."
A software problem dogged Spirit in the early weeks of its mission when it fell silent for a period, but engineers were able to work through the glitch and resume the rover's science mission.
That was waiting to bite us, Squyres said of the glitch, which involved Spirit's flash memory and required updated software to fix. If Opportunity had landed first, it would have had the same problem.Spirit has experienced other quirks, such as a finicky wheel that has left it dependent on only five of its six wheels to rove about Mars.
But the glitch has not prevented to rover from slowly making its way up Husband Hill in the Columbia Hills toward a vantage that, researchers hope, will give it a glimpse into a nearby valley.
How time flies! One year! Amazing. And all the things we have seen and learnt because of it. Our universe is a better place thanks to that project.
- Art Neuro
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