Stuck Mars rover Spirit to get roadside assistance from NASA

Associated Press

Last update: November 12, 2009 - 2:35 AM

LOS ANGELES - The Mars rover Spirit will soon try to drive itself out of a sand trap where it has been stuck for the past six months.

NASA is set to outline plans to try to free Spirit, a risky process that could take months.

Details of the extraction attempt will be announced later Thursday.

For the past several months, engineers have been busy testing different escape routes on Earth using prototype rovers.

Spirit and its twin Opportunity landed on Mars in 2004 and have outlasted their primary three-month mission.

Recent Science + Technology stories

Concur Technologies 4th-quarter profit, sales head higher - November 12, 2009

Concur Technologies 4th-quarter profit, sales head higher - Concur Technologies Inc., which makes corporate expense-management software, said Tuesday its fiscal fourth-quarter profit rose as revenue got a boost from a 13 percent increase in subscription revenue. More

Comment on this story | Be the first to comment | Hide reader comments

Blog: Patent Pending

Lights out at U energy conference. Irony police notified.

Just as Lawrence Kazmerski, a top official at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was about to give the keynote address at the University of Minnesota's annual E3 conference at the RiverCentre in St. Paul, the lights went out, bathing the audience in darkness and a deep sense of irony.