The little engines that could, whose 90 day martian misssions have been running since 2004, are getting ready to face their fiercest test: sunlight-blocking martian dust storms.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6909656.stm
Huge dust storms raging on Mars pose the worst threat yet to Nasa’s robot rovers, the US space agency has said.
Dust is starving the rovers of power by blocking out the sunlight needed to charge their batteries.
The six-wheeled, solar-powered rovers - Opportunity and Spirit - are operating at two distant sites just south of the Martian equator.
A series of dust storms have dogged the rovers for a month, and could continue for several more days, if not weeks.
If the sunlight is further reduced over an extended period, the rovers will not be able to generate enough power to operate or keep themselves warm.
In an effort to protect the rovers from power loss that has the potential to leave one or both permanently disabled, the US space agency has been scaling back their functions to the bare minimum, leaving them in near-dormant states.
“We’re rooting for our rovers to survive these storms, but they were never designed for conditions this intense,” said Nasa’s Alan Stern.
