2004-04-06
Rover Daily
Update Spirit Sol 91: "Spirit woke up on sol 91, which ended at 6:38
p.m. PDT on April 5, 2004, as if it were any other martian day, but this
one was special. Finishing 90 sols of surface operations since landing
day marked completion of the last of the official success criteria for
Spirit's prime mission. The rover team at JPL had checked off the
next-to-last box for mission success two days earlier, when a drive of
50.2 meters (165 feet) took Spirit's total travel distance over the
600-meter (1,969 feet) mark."
This might hint at further cutbacks in rover coverage. From the once
daily hour long press conference to "daily" 2 minute mission controller
updates, which now seem to get regularly skipped, we are down to the
still daily written summary:
I wonder how long those will last now. NASA people seem to be in a big hurry to declare the mission over so they can go home. Unfortunate really, since
in the beginning when the press was anxious to cover more territory they
were told that there was no hurry. The 90 day number was just the
MINIMUM life expectancy of the hardware. Now they are changing their
tune. The hardware is fine. Seems it is the personnel that is worn
out. Or maybe it has just exceeded the American publics attention span.
Ever shorter.
But no worry, USG will be happy to spend millions more to launch follow-on
rovers to cover the ground that these could have, but didn't.
