A while ago I wrote about the Mars rover Spirit, and the fact that it’s been stuck unable to move for the better part of a year. Earlier this week NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech announced that they were giving up on attempts to free her: Spirit will now remain in place as a ’stationary research station’.
Although Spirit did a sterling job - over 2200 days on a mission originally scheduled to last only 90! - it’s hard not to find the news sad. I confess I’ve always had a tendency to over-anthropomorphize objects, and especially to feel sorry for them when they break, but with Spirit at least I’m not the only one.
More at the NASA site, the Planetary Society blog (which looks a little at the politics of the announcement) and Bad Astronomy.
Oh!
Oh little robot. (Compared to the size of Mars.)
You did good science-chuffin’.