page_title: Spirit (rover)
section_title: Mars winter at Troy
hierarchical_section_title: Spirit (rover) / Mission timeline / 2010 / Mars winter at Troy
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Detailaufnahme Home Plate mit Fahrweg Spirit
context_page_description: Spirit, also known as MER-A or MER-2, is a robotic rover on Mars, active from 2004 to 2010. It was one of two rovers of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It landed successfully within the impact crater Gusev on Mars at 04:35 Ground UTC on January 4, 2004, three weeks before its twin, Opportunity, which landed on the other side of the planet. Its name was chosen through a NASA-sponsored student essay competition. The rover became stuck in a "sand trap" in late 2009 at an angle that hampered recharging of its batteries; its last communication with Earth was sent on March 22, 2010.
  The rover completed its planned 90-sol mission. Aided by cleaning events that resulted in more energy from its solar panels, Spirit went on to function effectively over twenty times longer than NASA planners expected. Spirit also logged 7.73 km of driving instead of the planned 600 m, allowing more extensive geological analysis of Martian rocks and planetary surface features. Initial scientific results from the first phase of the mission were published in a special issue of the journal Science.
  On May 1, 2009, Spirit became stuck in soft sand.
context_section_description: On January 26, 2010 (sol 2155), after several months attempting to free the rover, NASA decided to redefine the mobile robot mission by calling it a stationary research platform. Efforts were directed in preparing a more suitable orientation of the platform in relation to the Sun in an attempt to allow a more efficient recharge of the platform's batteries. This was needed to keep some systems operational during the Martian winter. On March 30, 2010, Spirit skipped a planned communication session and as anticipated from recent power-supply projections, had probably entered a low-power hibernation mode.
  The last communication with the rover was March 22, 2010 (sol 2208) and there is a strong possibility the rover's batteries lost so much energy at some point that the mission clock stopped. In previous winters the rover was able to park on a Sun-facing slope and keep its internal temperature above −40 °C (−40 °F), but since the rover was stuck on flat ground it is estimated that its internal temperature dropped to −55 °C (−67 °F). If Spirit had survived these conditions and there had been a cleaning event, there was a possibility that with the southern summer solstice in March 2011, solar energy would increase to a level that would wake up the rover.
caption: Spirit's concluding journey around Homeplate and ending location.
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