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TOPIC: Mars Exploration Rover Spirit
Blobrana


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spirit1-1.jpg
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A screen shot from software used by the Mars Exploration Rover team for assessing movements by Spirit and Opportunity illustrates the degree to which Spirit's wheels have become embedded in soft material at the location called "Troy." The image simulates Spirit's position on May 8, 2009, during the 1,900th Martian day, or sol, of what was originally planned as a 90-sol mission on Mars.

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NASA will begin transmitting commands to its Mars exploration rover, Spirit, on Monday as part of an escape plan to free the venerable robot from its Martian sand trap.
Spirit has been lodged at a site scientists call "Troy" since April 23. Researchers expect the extraction process to be long and the outcome uncertain based on tests here on Earth this spring that simulated conditions at the Martian site.

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NASA is hosting a media teleconference to discuss attempts to free the Mars rover Spirit from sandy soil where the robot has been stuck for the past six months.

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Listen (Windows media player)

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Blobrana


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NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST on Thursday, Nov. 12, to discuss attempts to free the Mars rover Spirit from sandy soil where the venerable robot has been stuck for the past six months.

Source NASA

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Amnesia-Like Behaviour Returns on Spirit
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover had gone more than six months without an episode of amnesia-like symptoms like those that appeared on four occasions earlier this year.
In these amnesia events, Spirit fails to record data from the day's activities onto the type of computer memory -- non-volatile "flash" memory -- that can retain the data when the rover powers down for its energy-conserving periods of "sleep." The reappearance of this behaviour in recent days might delay the start of planned drives by Spirit geared toward extricating the rover from a patch of soft soil where its wheels have been embedded since April.

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Blobrana


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Team Runs Operational Test to Prepare for Extracting Spirit
Engineers using test rovers on Earth to prepare for extracting the sand-trapped Spirit rover on Mars have added a new challenge to their preparations.
Until last week, the engineers commanding and assessing drives by the test rovers were usually in the same room as the sandbox setup simulating Spirit's predicament, where they can watch how each test goes. That changed for the latest preparation, called an operational readiness test.

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Rover team works to get Spirit unstuck, as Opportunity trucks along toward massive crater
The international campaign to "Free Spirit" -- complete with a dramatic logo -- sounds like a rallying cry around a political prisoner. It's actually a months-long, painstaking effort to extract Spirit, the long-lasting Mars exploration rover, from a patch of treacherous Martian soil.
"Free Spirit" may be coming to a head soon. In the past several weeks, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory finished experimentation on methods to get the rover unstuck from its location near a plateau called Home Plate. This has involved many hours of manoeuvring a test rover back on Earth in a manufactured patch of soil. Spirit has not moved since May 6.

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SPIRIT UPDATE:  Busy with Antenna Brake Testing and Underbelly Imaging - sols 2042 to 2049, Sept. 30 - Oct. 07, 2009:

Spirit is still currently in X-band fault mode due to a high-gain antenna (HGA) dynamic brake anomaly that first occurred on Sol 2027 and recurred again on Sol 2037. With this HGA fault, all X-band uplinks use the low-gain antenna (LGA), and uplink bandwidth is very limited. Forward-link commanding through Mars Odyssey is being used for all large commanding sequences like data management bundles and science sequencing.
On Sol 2044, Spirit completed another Microscopic Imager (MI) mosaic of the underneath of Spirit for extraction analysis, along with another test of the HGA dynamic brake. Results of that brake test were largely nominal. The current plan is to bring Spirit out of the X-band fault mode on Sol 2050 and perform a long-duration HGA motion test before resuming normal HGA operation. Spirit's systems are otherwise in good health.
As of Sol 2049, the rover solar array energy production was 423 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (tau) of 0.657 and a dust factor of 0.603.
Total odometry as of Sol 2049: 7,729.93 metres.

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SPIRIT UPDATE:  Progress on Antenna Actuator - sols 2029-2034, Sept. 17-22, 2009:

Spirit is recovering from the high-gain antenna (HGA) anomaly that occurred on Sol 2027 (Sept. 15, 2009). The HGA problem is suspected to be an apparent intermittent behaviour in the dynamic brake relay for the HGA actuators, a problem that has been seen and mitigated before in other rover actuators. Diagnostics were run on the HGA and each actuator moved freely in both directions without problems with the dynamic brake behaving normally.
The challenge for the rover team has been trying to uplink HGA recovery sequences over the low-gain antenna (LGA). Data rates over the LGA are so low that there is often insufficient time in the uplink window to get up all the necessary commands. Because of that, the project is using forward link UHF relay commanding through Mars Odyssey. The forward link has the additional complication that there is additional latency in getting the commands to the rover, so the pace of recovery is impacted. Return to normal HGA usage for Spirit is anticipated by next week. Spirit is otherwise in good health.

As of Sol 2033 (Sept. 21, 2009), Spirit's solar-array energy production was 418 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (tau) of 0.972 and a dust factor of 0.626. Total odometry remains at 7,729.93 metres.

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Mars rovers continue search for water

The Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, launched in the summer of 2003. Now, more than six years later, the two robot geologists are still running and collecting data on Mars, though their missions were originally expected to last only 90 days each.
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