Update on Spirit

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A week ago or so, I mentioned the plight of the Mars Rover Spirit.  Spirit is stuck and to make things worse the thought at the time was Spirit might be “belly hung” on a rock.

Images just release confirmed that to be the case, although it doesn’t look that bad, Spirit is what, about 184 million miles away?  Good luck to the mission managers – they will need it!

Rob had a pretty good idea (see the comments of the previous post), at least if all else fails.

Here’s the caption from the MER website:

This panorama of images from the Spirit rover, taken on Sol 1925 (June 2, 2009), is helping engineers assess the rover’s current state and plan her extraction from the soft soil in the region now called “Troy.” The images were taken by Spirit’s microscopic imager instrument, mounted on the end of her robotic arm.

This is the first time the microscopic imager has been used to assist in planning a rover’s escape from an embedding event. The imager isn’t intended to take these types of images–it is designed to focus on targets only 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) in front of its optics. As a result, the images in this mosaic are well out of focus. Yet despite the focus and the backlighting of the scene, the mosaic is still very useful for helping to assess the rover’s state. The mosaic, which is rotated to show the true orientation of the rover relative to the local terrain, shows the underside of the rover, the depth to which the wheels are embedded and the terrain itself in sufficient detail.