NASA gives up on Spirit rover

NASA has given up trying to reestablish communication with the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. The space agency has attempted to regain communication with Spirit since contact was lost on March 22, 2010. NASA was hopeful that, as solar energy increased on Mars, Spirit would become active again. But sadly, this did not happen, and Spirit remains silent.

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.