Cumbrian Sky

Worrying - but not entirely unexpected - news from NASA: the Mars Exploration Rover 'Opportunity' has apparrently suffered a technical failure with its robot arm, and it's possible that the arm will not be able to move again, severely limiting its ability to study rocks on Mars with the instrument package at the arm's end.

You can read the NASA Press Release here.

This isn't out-of-the-blue news by any means. The robot arm has had problems before, and let's not forget - although it's easy to - that Opportunity has now been trundling around Mars for well over 4 years, even though it was designed to last just 90 days or so on the red planet. I mean, come on, if you were plonked down on Mars, subjected to staggering extremes of temperature and sand-blasted with stinging, gritty dust for 4 years, wouldn't you feel a bit worse for wear by now?

NASA scientists insist that Oppy will still be able to do great work inside Victoria Crater, and back out on the plains of Meridiani too, once she exits Victoria. But is this the beginning of Oppy's eventual and inevitable wind-down? We'll have to wait and see...

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• #1 Comment from actionforspace 
  4/24/08 2:48 PM | Permalink

  I hope that some of the engineers who worked on the rover also worked on the ISS. If that does as well as the rovers, the ISS could be around for a very long time.