- PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters)
- NASA scientists said on Thursday they had lost contact with the robot
rover Spirit on Mars and were unsure what had caused the problem.
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- Spirit project manager Pete Theisinger told a news briefing
that there was a "very serious anomaly" in communications with
the six-wheeled craft, which landed on Mars on Jan. 3 on a planned three-month
mission to explore the geologic history of the planet.
-
- Theisinger said scientists had been unable to communicate
with Spirit for about 24 hours and had so far been unable to explain the
source of the problem.
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- "There is not one single fault that explains this,"
Theisinger said, adding that mission scientists had worked throughout the
night on scenarios ranging from a major power failure to a software or
memory corruption.
-
- Mission managers said Spirit was not completely dead,
and had sent out a communication beep and default signals. But they said
several attempts since Wednesday afternoon to send commands to the rover
and to receive data from it via the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter and the
Mars Odyssey orbiter had failed.
-
- The grim news dampened the elated atmosphere at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in California, where mission controllers have delighted
up until now at the virtually flawless landing on Mars.
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- Spirit last week began its first tentative journeys sampling
the surface soil of the Gusev Crater -- a barren, wind-swept basin that
scientists believe may have been the site of an ancient lake bed once fed
by a Martian river.
-
- The first hitch in the mission came on Wednesday when
a thunderstorm in Canberra, Australia, prevented mission controllers from
transmitting command sequences from the Canberra large dish antenna complex
to Spirit on its 18th day on the red planet.
-
- Project managers initially seemed unconcerned at the
setback but are now examining whether the communications glitch may have
contributed to the more serious problems with Spirit.
-
- Mission managers said on Thursday that the Spirit communications
problems would have no effect on the scheduled arrival on Saturday on the
opposite side of Mars of Spirit's twin exploration rover, Opportunity.
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- The two robotic rovers are the most advanced missions
to date in man's 40-year quest to discover the geologic history of Mars
and whether it was ever sufficiently warm or wet enough to sustain a recognizable
form of life.
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