Spirit's latest bout of troubles started on January 25th, when it failed to carry out its pre-determined daily duties. But then it went through a short period of... well, robotic amnesia, as it failed to record its activities in its non-volatile memory for a period. Although the probe seems to be working fine now, NASA's John Callas is staying suspicious:

At this time, we don't know whether the problem was a one-time event - whether it was induced by a cosmic ray - or whether it might be an indicator of ageing hardware... We're staying vigilant and keeping an eye out, but right now Spirit's back to where she was.

Personally, whenever a space probe mysteriously stops recording things, I think it's a sign of an alien invasion. You may scoff now, but give it a couple of years, and one of us will be laughing on the other side of our face. The other one... will be dead.

Remember when you saw the first footage of The Spirit of the cess pool fight, and I called it a disjointed attempt at slapstick? Well now there are six more clips for you to peruse, and decide if Frank Miller's Spirit will tempt you into spending your hard earned money on a movie ticket. My guess is after hearing some of these one-liners fall flat, the answer will be no. But then again Eva Mendes gets pretend naked, so that has to appeal to someone.
 
 
 
 
 
A Fight In An Alley



The Hospital

Common Criminal (Or Eva Takes Off Her Towel)

Eye Candy, Scarjo Explains Why She's On Team Octopus



Lots Of Guns

Snowballs Over Guns

This is terrible news, both scientifically and financially. The delay will cost about $400 thousand. Though the rover is only a few months behind schedule, the launch has to be delayed for two years due to launch trajectories. There's a limited time window for shooting a ship over to Mars, and that window will close before the rover is completed next year.

MSL, which we wrote about back in February (with a giant awesome gallery), is designed specifically to search for signs of habitability on Mars.

According to Space.com:

The particular technical issues delaying the mission are with the rover's actuators, which McCuistion describes as a combination of a motor and a gear box. The actuators control anything in the rover that moves, including the wheels and robotic arms.

"They're absolutely crucial to the success of this mission," McCuistion said. Without them "we'd basically have a metric ton of junk on the surface" of Mars, he added.

MSL Rover Delayed to 2011 [via Space.com]

Concept art of the MSL via NASA.

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• The first five missions to Mars were all Soviet flyby attempts, and all of them failed for reasons ranging from "radio failure" to "spacecraft broke apart." Still, it's impressive that they managed so many attempts within only two years in the early 60s.
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• The first US mission was also a failure when Mariner 3's shroud failed to jettison, leaving it without solar power. It remains to this day in a solar orbit. Mariner 4 ended up being the first successful mission to Mars in 1964 when it was able to return 21 images from a flyby. The ship continued operation until late 1967, when it ran into a micrometeoroid storm which caused severe alterations in trajectory and communications. It was lost forever in December of 1967.
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• We weren't able to orbit the planet for seven more years until Mariner 9 became the first satellite to successfully orbit the planet, barely beating the Soviets by a couple of months. The spacecraft used up its supply of fuel for adjusting trajectory, and was turned off a year later in 1972. Surprisingly, the satellite remains in a steady orbit around the planet, at least until 2022 when it should plunge into the atmosphere.
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• Numerous attempts at flybys and orbit resulted in both Soviet and US satellites exploding on launch, crashing back to Earth, or heading deep into the Atlantic Ocean. It would be a bit spooky encountering the remains of Mariner 8 in murky waters off the coast of Puerto Rico.
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• However, not being content to just fly past the planet or orbit it and send back images, plans were made to begin landing objects on Mars that could send data back to us. The Soviet Mars 2 achieved orbit back in 1971, but the Lander portion of the mission didn't go quite so well, and it crashed onto the surface of the planet. However, it has the dubious distinction of being the first manmade object to reach the surface of Mars.
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• The US Viking MIssions to Mars were some of the most successful Mars explorations ever launched. Viking I was launched in 1975, and after a 10 month journey to the red planet, it was successfully inserted into orbit. Then on July 20th 1976, the Viking Lander was launched from the ship, and landed on the planet and continued to operate for over six years. It was accidentally deactivated in 1982 when ground control sent a faulty command that caused the Lander to overwrite its own antenna pointing software, and all contact was lost. It still sits, alone and waiting, on the surface of the planet.
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• Viking 2 was launched a few months after Viking I, but its batteries failed early, and it was shut off in 1980. It's harder to think of a more lonely image than the two Viking Landers sitting abandoned on the face of Mars.
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• The Soviet Union tried again to launch Mars missions in the late 1980s, still stinging from the general failure of their Marsnik program from the 1960s, and the Mars program of the 1970s. However, both Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 suffered critical failures. Phobos 2 was lost when its transmitter failed to turn back on (it was shut off when the spacecraft was taking photos), and Phobos 1 was lost when a command sent from Earth left out a single character and caused the ship to go into a spin from which it never recovered.
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• The United States decided to return to Mars in 1992 with the Mars Observer. However, that ship was lost just three days before it was to be inserted into Mars orbit, and no one knows what happened to it. Theories state that there was an explosion in a propellant line, although we'll never know for sure.
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• The Russians tried again in 1996 with Mars 96, a ship based on the Phobos designs, but it failed to exit the Earth's atmosphere, and the ship crashed off the coast of Chile.
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• The US also decided to try again that same year with the Mars Global Surveyor which successfully orbited the planet and returned images for ten years. In 2006 it was determined that the vehicle had gone into "safe mode," and NASA officially ended the mission in January of last year.
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• NASA also had much success with the launch of the Mars Pathfinder, and its Sojourner Rover, which became the first Martian Rover. It was able to transmit 16,500 images in three months, although we lost contact with it in 1997, and NASA officially shut it down in 1998. Interesting fact: the landing zone for the Pathfinder was designated the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, in honor of the man who said beelyuns, a billion times.
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• Japan decided to get into the race for the red planet in 1998 with the launch of Nozomi (Japanese for "Hope"), although it failed to achieve the proper trajectory, used too much fuel, and was damaged by severe solar flares. Although the ship didn't achieve its mission, it remains operational in solar orbit.
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• One of NASA's most massive failures came in 1998 when it launched the Mars Climate Orbiter. This was the famous ship that burned up in the Martian atmosphere, due to the fact that a technician at Lockheed Martin had used Imperial measurements instead of the Metric system. Ouch.
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• NASA launched the Mars Polar Lander a year later, and it suffered a severe failure moments before landing on the planet. Although it supposedly crashed to the surface, attempts to locate wreckage have failed, and it remains lost. Spooky, eh?
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• NASA also tried to launch two probes in the Deep Space 2 mission in 1999 that would penetrate the surface of Mars, but they were never heard from once they slammed into the surface. Nothing like angering the red planet, is there?
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• In 2001 NASA launched the 2001 Mars Odyssey, named after 2001, A Space Odyssey, and it remains in action to this day, with its current mission extended to September of this year.
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• In 2003 NASA launched the Mars Exploration Rovers Opportunity and Spirit within a month of each other, and they both remain in operation to this day. In fact, Spirit was just narrowly saved from being shut off. Last summer, both rovers endured dust storms on the planet that blacked out the sky and nearly forced them to run out of power due to their separation from the sun, but they both lived through it.
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• The European Space Agency also launched the Mars Express in 2003, which was a mission in two parts: the Mars Express Orbiter, which is still in use today, and the Beagle 2. The Beagle 2 was an ambitious lander that failed to make contact after it was supposed to land on the planet, and was declared lost in 2004.
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• NASA launched the Phoenix last August, as part of the Mars Scout Program, and it is due to touch down on Mars in May of this year. It'll use a robotic arm to dig into the polar terrain, and try to find out the mystery of Martian water. Namely: where the hell did it all go?
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• There are many more Mars missions planned for the next two decades, including another NASA rover, this one three times bigger than Spirit or Opportunity, and another try by the Russian Phobos design team, the first since 1996. No one can resist the pull of Mars.
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The Mars rovers have been one of NASA's most proud achievements, and the information they gather today can help future planetary colonists tomorrow. While NASA is planning to land another rover on Mars within the next year, it's a shame to shut down a perfectly serviceable rover that could be supplementing what the new rover will learn.

With the Earth population skyrocketing, and urban overcrowding only likely to get far worse over the coming decades, preparing to colonize other plants should be more of a priority than ever. And every time we shut down a NASA program like the rovers, we step backward, away from the goal of leaving Earth. We also hinder our search for knowledge beyond this planet.

If I thought that money being cut from NASA's budget were going to developing renewable energy or bettering urban environments, I wouldn't be quite so pissed off. At least in that case, the money would be going toward building a better future Earthside. But it's not. Instead it's being used to bail out Bear Stearns.

Why doesn't a philanthropist like Bill Gates or Paul Allen step forward and write a check to save Spirit?

Spirit is an awesome robot, with awesome developers and operators at NASA, who braved the elements and mechanical problems to help advance our understanding of Martian geochemistry and atmosphere. The U.S. government should be ashamed that it has effectively killed fifty percent of its only science lab on another planet.

Above, you can see a picture Spirit took of its own tracks in the dust.

Kthxbai, Spirit, kthxbai.

UPDATE: NASA has just confirmed that the rovers will NOT be shut down! Hooray! [AP via Yahoo! News]

NASA Cut Means No More Roving for Mars Rover [AP via PhysOrg]

• Richard Cook, designer of MSL, said that it's three times heavier than Spirit and Opportunity, the two rovers currently on Mars right now. It's powered by nuclear energy, designed to last 20 years, travel 10 km, and comes equipped with a laser for vaporizing rocks so it can do chemical and mineralogical analysis on them. "We call it the death ray," he confessed. Joked NASA Jet Propulsion Lab Director Charles Elachi, "In a few years people will be visiting Mars and see bullet holes all over the place [from the laser]."
• When Cook and his team were designing Spirit and Opportunity, they wanted to do what he called a "built to print," meaning to the specs on paper. They wanted to base it on the model they'd developed for Sojourner, the previous generation Martian rover. But immediately they figured out that wouldn't work, especially with the more-complicated MER rovers, since they still had to fit inside a small lander. "it's hard to take a rover and put it inside a tetrahedron," Cook said with a laugh, referring to the shape of the lander.
• The MSL rover, which will blast off next year, will be able to do experiments that tell us a lot more about Martian water sources. It can do gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS). It has an onboard camera.
• Steve Squyres said he was disappointed when Spirit landed in Gusev Crater, which he hoped would be a lakebed. Instead, it was covered in a layer of lava rocks. "I believe the lakebed is there, but it's covered in lava," he said. Luckily, Spirit was able to make it to the Columbia Hills nearby to study a wide variety of rocks.
• Some of the rocks that Spirit studied show strong evidence of having been saturated by water, probably steam. Most likely, the hit that created the Gusev Crater shot a bunch of superhot rocks out to the Columbia Hills, and these melted ground water into steam.
• "When we talk about water on Mars, what we really mean is sulfuric acid," Squyres explained with a grin.
• There is absolutely no doubt that there has been water on Mars, Squyres said, but the fact is that the ratio of water to rocks has always been very low. One piece of compelling visual evidence he showed us was from a study of the sorts of patterns water leaves in soil over years of flowing on it. He compared images of a characteristic, smile-shaped pattern created by waters from the Colorado River with images from rocks on Mars. The smile shapes and sizes were nearly exactly the same.
• The rover Opportunity is currently at the Victoria Crater, where it is studying layers in the cliffs to learn more about the geological history of Mars. Some layers make it clear that water did at one point saturate the planet's surface. The walls of the crater are so steep that scientists have to pilot the rover based on satellite images taken by a recently-arrived spacecraft. He showed us images from the spacecraft, which are so high-resolution that you can see Opportunity and the shadow of its antenna at the edge of the crater.
• About the Victoria Crater mission, Squyres said, "It takes a lot of guts to drive an 8 hundred million dollar piece of equipment along the edge of a cliff on another planet."
• Andrew Knoll said that the real question isn't whether there has been water on Mars, because surely there has been. The question is whether that water is habitable for life as we know it.
• Unfortunately for people who want to meet alien life, the prognosis is not good. Chemical and mineral evidence suggests that water on the planet is so salty and acidic that it wouln't support any organisms we know. "Water on Mars would be challenging for life as we know it," he said.
• Knoll added that water could have flowed on Mars if it was extremely salty because salt lowers the freezing point of water. Or it could have flowed as a result of asteroid hits that temporarily melted ice.
• MSL will do more definitive mineral analysis to determine what the chemical composition of Martian water might have been (or might be).
• There has been a lot of debate over the Martian "gullies," structures that look like they were cut into the Martian surface with water. Squyres said, "Some were created during the last five years and look like they've been created by water. But all the ones we've looked at have slopes that suggest they were probably caused by avalanche not water."

Says the Bad Astronomy Blog:

That does look like a guy hanging out on Mars, enjoying the 0.01 Earth atmospheric pressure, the 98% CO2 air, the subfreezing cold, and of course, just being four inches tall. Martians are pretty short, it seems. And patient, given its pose.