And They Wanted To Send A Man To Mars!

by EphemeralNotion

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday, Jan. 22, 2004 Thursday, Jan. 22, 2004 at 3:36:33pm PST

NASA's Spirit Rover is looking more and more like (yet another) $410 million hunk of scrap metal.

NASA's Spirit rover stopped transmitting data from Mars for more than 24 hours, mission managers said Thursday, calling it an "extremely serious anomaly."
NASA last heard from Spirit early Wednesday. Since then, it has returned just random, meaningless radio noise -- and only then sporadically, scientists said. Initially, the scientists said they believed weather problems on Earth caused the glitch. They now said they believe the rover was experiencing hardware or software problems.

Perhaps it was fortuitous that Bush's didn't mention Mars in the SotU address.

Hopefully NASA will be able to reestablish communication with the Rover. Otherwise that's 410 million taxpayer dollars beeping futilely on the surface of the Red Planet.