Título: Spirit (rover)
Seção: Global dust storm and Home Plate
Background: Spirit, also known as MER-A (Mars Exploration Rover - A) or MER-2, is a robotic rover on Mars, active from 2004 to 2010. It was one of two rovers of NASA's ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It landed successfully on Mars at 04:35 Ground UTC on January 4, 2004, three weeks before its twin, Opportunity (MER-B), landed on the other side of the planet. Its name was chosen through a NASA-sponsored student essay competition.

Conteúdo: On January 21, 2004 (sol 17), Spirit abruptly ceased communicating with mission control. The next day the rover radioed a 7.8 bit/s beep, confirming that it had received a transmission from Earth but indicating that the craft believed it was in a fault mode. Commands would only be responded to intermittently. This was described as a very serious anomaly, but potentially recoverable if it were a software or memory corruption issue rather than a serious hardware failure. Spirit was commanded to transmit engineering data, and on January 23 sent several short low-bitrate messages before finally transmitting 73 megabits via X band to Mars Odyssey. The readings from the engineering data suggested that the rover was not staying in sleep mode. As such, it was wasting its battery energy and overheating - risk factors that could potentially destroy the rover if not fixed soon. On sol 20, the command team sent it the command SHUTDWN_DMT_TIL ("Shutdown Dammit Until") to try to cause it to suspend itself until a given time. It seemingly ignored the command.  The leading theory at the time was that the rover was stuck in a "reboot loop". The rover was programmed to reboot if there was a fault aboard. However, if there was a fault that occurred during reboot, it would continue to reboot forever. The fact that the problem persisted through reboot suggested that the error was not in RAM, but in either the flash memory, the EEPROM, or a hardware fault. The last case would likely doom the rover

user: What is Home Plate?

assistant: During 2007 Spirit spent several months near the base of the Home Plate plateau.

user: When did the global dust storm occur?

assistant: Towards the end of June 2007, a series of dust storms began clouding the Martian atmosphere with dust.

user: How did the dust storms affect the rover?

assistant: The storms intensified and by July 20, both Spirit and Opportunity were facing the real possibility of system failure due to lack of energy.

user: Did either end up experiencing a system failure?

assistant: In early August the storms began to clear slightly, allowing the rovers to successfully charge their batteries.

user: What did the rovers find?

assistant: In September and October it examined rocks and soils at several locations on the southern half of the plateau.

user: Did they explorer anything else?

assistant: On November 6, Spirit had reached the western edge of Home Plate, and started taking pictures for a panoramic overview of the western valley,

user: What else did they find?

assistant: In September and October it examined rocks and soils at several locations on the southern half of the plateau.

user: Other than the dust storm, were there any other problems?

assistant: CANNOTANSWER

user: What else happened that was interesting?

assistant: an independent website published a magnified detail of the image that showed a rock feature a few centimeters high resembling a humanoid figure