At more than 55 million kilometers away (how many miles is that?), NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is having technical difficulties. Apparently the rover rebooted several times last weekend. Irregularities in communications alerted scientists to the glitch.
Both rovers have greatly exceeded their original mission of 3 months. They’ve been there over 5 years. That’s pretty amazing considering communication delays over distance, adverse environmental conditions, and Murphy’s Law.
What we have here… Is a failure to communicate!
Prior planning, obviously based on their knowledge of the reliability of our technology, NASA installed multiple methods for the rovers to communicate with earth. They have a high-gain dish, a low-gain antenna and a UHF transceiver. NASA deserves credit for planning multiple backup systems and a big pat on the back for the missions themselves. But, is it a communications problem or something else? One can either take what the media provides as gospel or speculate.
I’m sure it’s a bummer for the scientists at NASA. It’s not like they can send a technician on a house call. We’ll never truly know what happened unless it can be brought back and put on a tech bench for diagnosis. Until then, it becomes Martian litter when it dies.
Ain’t technology great?
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