(I think the comments are still broken, sorry.)
There's been lots of talk since Thursday's press briefing about the extended mission for the two MERs. Jennifer Trospers mentioned that the team thought the rovers could make 200 sols, more than double the mission's 90 sol nominal lifetime. Last month Steve Squyres suggested that the rovers could be driving well into the summer.
What does this extended mission mean for the Spirit rover?
It's looking more and more like Bonneville crater, where the MER-A currently sits, isn't going to prove interesting enough to drive down into. If either the science team determines that Bonneville's interior is not interesting enough or the engineers decide that it might be a bit of a rover trap, that's going to make the East Hills complex the next target. At a distance of roughly 2.5 kilometers, it's a fairly distant target.
Spirit's taken about 30 days to drive the 350 or so meters to Bonneville. Today I read, over at Due Diligence, that Spirit's driving speed of 5 cm/sec makes for a fairly long trip over to the East Hills complex.
I suck at math, but I think that 5 cm/sec must be max-speed, rolling downhill, on smooth pavement or something. By my admittedly poor math, that would work out to 180 m/hr and that seems really, really fast given that on top sols, Spirit only made 30 meters (though I seem to recall Dr. Squyres suggesting that a 100 meter sol was not out of the question). I know that Spirit doesn't drive for her full sol uptime, and she was certainly spending considerable time (and more importantly, power) on science targets, but at speeds like 5 cm/sec, she would surely do more than 30 (or Squyres' 100 meters) in a sol. I think that 5 cm/sec is probably just raw motor speed and doesn't take into account any other requirements for actual driving.
Assuming that 100 m/soly is the upper limit and with 30 meters/sol as the proven baseline capability, how long until Spirit's sitting at the foot the East Hills? My math says, roughly, something between 25 and 85 sols. If we don't find anything terribly interesting along the way, I'm guessing in the middle of that range and estimate that it's going to be about 2 months of driving to get to the hills.
That's about how long it's been since Spirit's wheels first hit the ground and would put Spirit at the 2/3rds mark for the extended mission. That's quite exciting to me -- in the hills with as much as 2 months of remaining life to do science. That would totally rock. Heck, even at only 20 m/sol, Spirit could still make it to the hills, or very close, and get some really nice Pancam pics and mini-TES data.
As a spectator, my biggest concern is not for the capability or lifetime of the rover, but for the budget that's making all this science and coverage possible. Does anyone out there have any information on whether the "extended" mission will actually be funded? Will, for example, the folks keeping the images flowing to the website and the people doing the press releases still be around and paid to continue these activities? Will the science team members all return to their jobs in academia and elsewhere or will they continue full-time involvement with the rovers until the very end? Were these questions already asked and answered and I just missed it?
(If you've got anything to add and my comments still aren't working, then please use email or your blog to comment. Sorry, again, for the brokenness of things here).
