A Year on Mars

You don’t hear much about space exploration on the nightly television news these days, but if you do a little googling, you’ll find that there’s actually a lot of activity going on Out There. Between the various US organizations, the ESA (European Space Agency), and the Japanese, our species has placed its mechanical proxies all over the solar system, everywhere from the very edge of interstellar space back to Jupiter and Saturn, and all the way inward to the sun. But the missions that seem to draw the most public attention are the ones focused on Mars, especially the rock stars of robotic space probes, those two intrepid little rovers. The first rover to land on the Red Planet, Spirit, has just celebrated its first year there — its first Martian year, that is, which is actually equivalent to about two Earth years. Not bad for a machine that was only supposed to last 90 days. The official press release puts this milestone into some perspective:

During Spirit’s martian year, the seasons have changed from summer to winter and back again. In its orbit around the Sun, Mars has returned to where it was when the rover first landed. Having survived seven times its expected lifetime and traveling over 3 miles (about 5,000 meters), Spirit is still going strong.

If you have a minute, give that entire press release a look; it’s an interesting recap of Spirit’s various discoveries as well as its arduous climb up the Columbia Hills, with several pictures and a map of the rover’s wanderings. You might also want to check out the “special effects” photos prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to commemorate the anniversary. Basically, they’ve combined a Hollywood-style digital model of the rover with actual images sent back from Mars to give us an external view of how Spirit might look in the Martian environment. My personal favorite of is this one. I like the romantically bittersweet feeling of the little probe all alone in the coming night of an alien world…

spacer

2 comments on “A Year on Mars

  1. anne

    Very cool. These are deffinately the little robots that could.

  2. jason

    That’s for sure… they’ve definitely earned their keep.