Spirit shows Spirit
3/24/10
Spirit goes myspace with this self-portrait. Image Credit: NASA
A few months ago, Spirit, the Mars rover, got stuck in a sandpit. After several weeks of effort trying to free Spirit from the sandpit, NASA declared Spirit a "mobile research platform." However, it seems NASA spoke too soon. Recent news from NASA reports that they've managed to wiggle Spirit a total of 34cm, nearly out of the sandpit. Spirit, at the moment, is shut down to preserve it during the martian winter.
“It’s all rather promising,” Jim Bell of Cornell University, the principal investigator for the rovers’ panoramic cameras, told Science News. “Once the power comes back, if we’re able to keep the rover alive over the winter, we’ll be able to continue those driving methods and maybe get out of that mess.”
Part of the issue with Spirit's situation is that NASA can only communicate with the rovers for three hours a day, due to orbits and diurnal rotation(day-night rotation). The rovers can only send and receive about 12 kilobits per second. That is only 12,000 ones or zeroes per second. In comparison, this is only 1500 characters, so you could write a small paragraph with that much bandwidth. Realistically, its not a lot, so NASA needs to use the bandwidth carefully. Thus, they plan out each day's commands, and then receive pictures. Overall, Spirit and Opportunity can only send 15 megabytes of data, about the size of a long mp3 song. It would take several days to send a large jpeg image.
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