In The Field
LPSC 2010: Spirit: Not dead yet
So the obituaries for the Mars rover Spirit are a bit premature, says rover scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University, who I caught up with in the hallway here at LPSC. Since NASA headquarters held a press conference at the end of January announcing that Spirit would become a stationary science lander, the rover got itself unstuck and moved 34 centimeters using a sort of lateral ice-skating-like blading action. “We only stopped because we had to get ready for winter,” Arvidson said.