Free Spirit (It’s Too Late)

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 26 of February , 2010 at 4:01 am

Poor Spirit. I do so wish there was something we could do. $16 from ThinkGeek, and zero percent of the proceeds go to the Bring Spirit Home fund. Incidentally, here’s the latest update on Spirit:

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is now parked for the winter. The rover team is commanding Spirit this week to make additional preparations for the Mars southern hemisphere winter season. The team does not plan further motion of the wheels until spring comes to Spirit’s location beside the western edge of a low plateau called Home Plate.

Spirit will spend the coming winter tilted 9 degrees toward the south, an unfavorable attitude for the solar panels to catch rays from the sun in the northern sky. Spirit’s parking positions for its previous three Martian winters tilted northward. Engineers anticipate that, due to the unfavorable tilt for this fourth winter, Spirit will be out of communication with Earth for several months.

Spirit may enter a low-power hibernation mode within a few weeks, shutting down almost all functions except keeping a master clock running and checking its power status periodically until it has enough power to reawaken. It may go in and out of this mode a few times at the beginning and at the end of an extended hibernation period.

I’m not going to buy this shirt for the simple reason that wearing it would keep me on the verge of tears all the time. Proud tears, but still, that would totally ruin the manly image that I am so used to projecting.

Poor little robot :’(

[ ThinkGeek ]

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Category: Space

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