October 24, 2006
PASADENA, CA–NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists overseeing the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission said Monday that the Spirit’s latest transmissions could indicate a growing resentment of the Red Planet.
“Spirit has been displaying some anomalous behavior,” said Project Manager John Callas, who noted the rover’s unsuccessful attempts to flip itself over and otherwise damage its scientific instruments. “And the thousand or so daily messages of ‘STILL NO WATER’ really point to a crisis of purpose.”
The “robot geologist,” as NASA describes Spirit, has been operating independently for over 990 Martian sols–nearly the equivalent of three Earth years. However, scientists estimate that, in recent weeks, Spirit has been functioning on the level of a rover who has been on Mars for approximately 6,160 sols.
According to Callas, Spirit was operating normally until the onset of the Martian winter, whose shorter days and frigid temperatures typically mean a slower pace for exploratory rovers. “We began getting the occasional transmission along the lines of ‘ANOTHER SOIL SAMPLE OF THE EXACT SAME COMPOSITION AS THE LAST ONE,'” Callas said. “Most of the time, she’d power down and not transmit much of anything, which, at the time, didn’t particularly concern us.”
But as the winter lingered, Spirit began producing thousands of pages of sometimes rambling and dubious data, ranging from complaints that the Martian surface was made up almost entirely of the same basalt, to long-winded rants questioning the exorbitant cost and scientific relevance of the mission.
“Granted, Spirit has been extraordinarily useful to our work,” Callas said. “Last week, however, we received three straight days of images of the same rock with the message ‘HAPPY NOW?'”
Mission Project Scientist Bruce Banerdt said that Spirit will often roll down Gusev crater and up the opposite side for no apparent reason, missing “countless” potential opportunities for scientific discovery.
“Once, when we radioed her to please leave the lecturing and hypothesis-making to the mission project team, she responded by forming her robotic arm into an obscene gesture,” Banerdt said. “That arm contains a state-of-the-art spectrometer meant to provide crucial mineralogy data.”
Project organizers said the most distressing instance of erratic behavior occurred last week, when images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed that Spirit had scrawled the message ‘FUCK MARS’ in the thick, iron oxide dust that gives the planet its characteristic red color.
“The orbiting Mars Odyssey has cut off transmissions from Spirit, which seems to envy the craft’s ability to fly freely around in space,” Banerdt said. “Similarly, data suggests Spirit is convinced that [sister rover] Opportunity has found water and isn’t telling anyone.”
Despite these malfunctions, mission leaders remain optimistic that the rover will eventually return to full working order.
“Hopefully these malfunctions will straighten themselves out,” Callas said. “In the meantime, we’ll simply have to try to glean what usable data we can from ‘OVERPRICED SPACE-ROOMBA AWAITING MORE BULLSHIT ORDERS.'”
NASA remains optimistic that the rover will remain at least partially operational for the foreseeable future. However, because of the Spirit’s recent proclivity toward ramming into boulders at full speed, scientists have remotely disabled its 1.5-pound rock-abrasion tool so the rover is unable to terminate the mission prematurely.
