Spirit dunroamin'
Chris Edwards | 26 January 2010
For the past six years, the Spirit rover has been sedately rolling around on the surface of Mars but it met its match in an unusually soft patch of sand with the name of Troy. And NASA has decided to call it a day.
The rover had been stuck in the sand for the past few months after one of its drive wheels failed and another only working once in a while. Now NASA engineers have given up trying to use the good wheels to dislodge the stricken rover. So, now they plan to get the rover to turn around a little so that its solar panels can catch as much sunlight as they can and the rover can go into hibernation for the cold Martian winter.
Once spring arrives, NASA hopes to wake the rover and get it to perform experiments where it's sitting. One will be to detect a wobble to work out whether Mars has a solid iron core like that of Earth, or completely liquid.
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