According to NASA, “Engineers’ assessments in recent months have shown a very low probability for recovering communications with Spirit,” so they have given up on Spirit and have shifted focus to Curiosity, a new Mars rover scheduled for launch in November 2011.
Spirit’s six-year residency on the red planet resulted in “127,000 raw images of the Martian surface, including 16 color, 360-degree panoramas,” and provided “invaluable data on the planet’s geology,” according to Popular Science.
Clay Dillow of Popular Science wrote a fitting obituary for Spirit HERE.
