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NASA’s announcement last week that its Mars rover Spirit failed to respond to one last radio message read a bit like an obituary.
But in Larry Crumpler’s office on the second floor of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque, it doesn’t feel that way.
For six years, Spirit, a six-wheeled robot smaller than a golf cart, served as Crumpler’s eyes on the distant planet. A geologist and research curator at the New Mexico museum, Crumpler has been part of NASA’s rover science and mission planning team since the beginning.
Four computer screens full of Martian maps, science plans and vivid imagery of the distant planet surround Crumpler, one of a team of researchers around the country whose work is funded by NASA to help on the space mission.
When Crumpler talks about Mars, it is as if he has been there himself. And thanks to Opportunity, a second rover still traveling the surface of the distant planet, in a sense he still is.
Spirit, mired in deep dust and out of power, had been silent for more than a year. No one expected to hear back this time ’round. Last week’s farewell transmission was a formality, a final gesture from the ground control team to the little robot.
“Last night, just after midnight, the last recovery command was sent to Spirit,” Mars rover project lead John Callas wrote in a note to his colleagues. “There is a continued silence from the Gusev site on Mars.”
But despite Spirit’s loss, its twin rover, Opportunity, is still chugging along, and Crumpler’s seven-year Martian odyssey continues.
The rovers’ endurance is an engineering marvel. When the two landed on opposite sides of the planet in January 2004, plans called for 90-day missions.
When the 90-day mark came close, Crumpler recalled, a member of the team had to make more computer files to handle the extended mission. They settled on 500 days’ worth.
The decision was met with laughter. No one expected it to last that long, Crumpler recalled.
As they approached the 500-day mark, they created enough computer files to last 2,000 days. Again, laughter.
The Martian days are known as “sols,” and when I stopped by Crumpler’s Museum of Natural History Office on Friday, he was on a phone/Internet conference call planning sols 2,611 and 2,612.
Seven years into what was planned as a 90-day mission, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science geologist Larry Crumpler continues his tour of the surface of Mars as a member of NASA's rover team. (JIM THOMPSON/JOURNAL)
“We just kept going,” Crumpler said.
Every year, Spirit and Opportunity would hunker down for the Martian winter. The low sun angle reduced the available power. What little there was largely went to running heaters to keep sensitive electronics alive.
Every spring, the scientists worried they wouldn’t be able to coax their robots back out of hibernation. “We kept expecting not to make it through the winter,” Crumpler said.
After a series of breakdowns and bad luck, it was finally the bad winter that seems to have done in Spirit. The rover is stuck and unable to tilt its solar panels toward the sun, and its electronics likely froze during the last Martian winter. Efforts to reach it continued, but Spirit never seems to have waked back up.
Opportunity, though, chugs on.
After wake-up Saturday as the sun hit its solar panels (“power happy” in mission jargon), the planners instructed Opportunity to use its “Panoramic Camera” to snap some pictures of the neighborhood, then reach out with its instrument arm to study some nearby rocks.
After a couple of days looking around, Opportunity will be on the move again this week, tortoise speed, toward a crater a couple of miles away the scientists have dubbed Endeavour, which they think formed 2 billion to 3 billion years ago when something very large struck Mars.
It’s easy to anthropomorphize the plucky little robots wandering the surface of Mars, to imbue them in our minds with human characteristics. But to listen to Crumpler and his colleagues talk, something more interesting and subtle has happened.
Listen, for example, to how Crumpler described Spirit’s demise: “We just ran out of power.”
Not “it.” “We.”
A visiting scholar spent time with the team, Crumpler said, and concluded that its day-to-day language suggested that the rover was not so much a thing apart as an extension of the team — almost like the team members were there on the planet, riding a bus around together, stopping and hopping off to look at the rocks just like an earthbound geology field trip.
“You really feel like you’ve been walking around on Mars,” he said.
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. Comment directly to John at 823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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