Mars: What happened to the Spirit Rover?
5,946,689
Published 2020-11-23
If the Spirit rover could speak, this is what it would have said.
Our story begins in 2004, January 4th.
The spirit rover slams into the dusty surface of Mars, bouncing on it’s airbags 28 times before coming to rest.
It landed about 13 kilometres away from the targeted site, in the Gusev Crater.
The team at NASA informally named the landing site ‘Columbia Memorial Station’, in honour of the astronauts who were lost in the Columbia disaster, just the year before in 2003.
After a successful landing, Spirit opens its eyes. This is the first colour image Spirit captured, which was, at that time; the highest definition image ever taken on another planet.
So far the mission was running smoothly, but that was all about to change.
On January 21st, Spirit’s 17th Martian day, mission control suddenly lost contact with the rover.
The next day, Spirit sent a short beep, confirming that it had received a signal from Earth but that the rover believed it was in some sort of fault mode.
At the time, NASA engineers speculated that the rover was stuck in a reboot loop. Spirit was programmed to restart if it detected a fault, but if that fault occurred during reboot, it would continue to reboot indefinitely.
This meant that the rover was not going into sleep mode, therefore wasting it’s energy and running the risk of overheating. This error was taken very seriously and could have signalled the end of Spirit’s journey.
Luckily, on Spirit’s 19th day, the team at NASA announced that the problem was actually with Spirit’s flash memory, and the issue was software related. The fix was as easy as deleting some files carried on the rover’s flash drives and reformatting the system.
By day 32, Spirit was back up and running.
Spirit would go on to make more discoveries and run into more trouble, watch the video to see spirit's full journey.
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All Comments (21)
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Spirit: I have to go to bed now see you tomorrow Last online: 11 years ago
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“It’s cold and I can’t move” Well that’s terrifying
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Spirit is like that one online friend you had that you basically grew up with, he says “I’ll see you tmr morning” and then he’s just never online again, but you always remember him
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It’s kind of scary to think that life could have existed on Mars once long ago.. and now it looks like that. Cold, barren, Empty, lonely.
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“You should only last 90 days spirit” Continues to work for 6 years like a BOSS Stop replying to this comment if it has nothing to do with the topic above
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Spirit makers: designed for existing for 90 days Spirit: how bout 6 years
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Space is literally the most fascinating thing ever. It’s just an empty desert, but it’s so cool to see. I really wish we could find other life forms out there
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Two things: gotta love how every aspect of this mission was carried to learn into the next ones, including the precursor for a crane landing, the bouncy ball, which brings me to ... holly shit, you have got to give the engineers over at NASA every spec of respect for making a device able to suck up all that punishment upon landing. We'd have to get all our bones set 15 times over if we'd bounce half as much as that rover did. Amazing.
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Alien: what do you want from us? Spirit: r o c c
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I love how the entire comment section is cheering Spirit
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To think humans will physically find Spirit again is kinda mind blowing 🤯
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At first, i thought it would be super easy for a robot to survive in mars, because there are not many things there that could possibly damage it. Like, it's just a cold desert where nothing really moves, and there are no animals, no rain, no overheated surfaces. It turns out the sand and the extreme cold can be pretty damaging.
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“The team sent 1500 commands but Spirit remained silent”... It must hurt to get ghosted by a robot lol
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Spirit was a good boy. He tried his best and made nasa proud. Pleasant dreams.
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For a vehicle that was intended for only 90 days, 6 years is so much longer, gotta give credit to the NASA team who kept the machine operating.
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It's INSANE how a robot can make someone this emotional
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Spirit: "It's getting cold and I can't move." Perseverance: "Come on, this is no place to die."
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I’m waiting for the day when NASA gets a message from Spirit. “I’m awake.”
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14:18 this is straight up my phobia, stuck in time or alone in space even though i can survive, just pure Loneliness is my phobia
