Eight years. I mean seriously -- eight years!

8 years ?!?! As Mars veterans, we used to measure the life of a lander until its last transmission from Mars... Unfortunately, no more.
So : Spirit lived until its mission Sol 2210 (March 22, 2010), and no communication has been received from Spirit since.
Anyway, thanks a lot for your enthusiasm : it warms us a lot

While they are separate vehicles, I tend to think of Spirit and Opportunity as one mission.
We can honor Spirit's anniversary and journey while at the same time Opportunity continues the mission to explore Mars.

Eight years... unbelievable...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWk-umZm86U

Never dared hope - not even in my most optimistic, most misty-eyed moods - that eight years after they landed, one of the rovers would still be roving. Make no mistake, downstream, in the deep future, the achievements of the rovers, and the men and women behind them, will be marvelled at. And historians will trawl the posts and threads of UMSF, and wish that they'd been here to live through these magical days with us.

Still very emotional watching this video. This has been a Life changing day for quite some people including myself.

As a tribute to Spirit and honoring Opportunity's continuing adventure, 'poet dude' extraordinaire Stuart Atkinson has written some beautiful words which I have incorporated into a new 'poemster' (poem-poster).

Full resolution and wallpaper versions are on my blog.

Click to view attachment

NB: Before anybody goes the figure '8' of the rover tracks is not real, just added for effect

Here's Stu poem:

FIGURE EIGHT
Hard to believe the Homeworld has circled Sol eight times
Since the first MER bounced and boinged to a historic halt on Mars,
Spirit followed faithfully soon after by her sister, Opportunity,
Just as Clark had followed Lewis two centuries before.
Babies born bloodied and bawling on that day chase girls
In busy schoolyards now; wide-eyed, Star Trek t-shirt-wearing
Interns who stumbled along the deer-stalked paths of JPL
Now have interns of their own, and peer at screens painted
Picasso-shades by real data beamed from the true Final Frontier...

In a thousand years, when Mars has oceans of retina-burning blue,
And honeymooning couples crump across the snow-capped summit
of Olympus, the names 'Spirit' and "Opportunity' will still be
Spoken wistfully; and tourists from Titan, explorers from Europa
And Hyperion's most respected historians will stand before
The rovers, displayed in all their restored glory in the Great
Museum of Mars and envy us, this generation which saw Gusev's
Rugged Rocks and Meridiani's misty mountains for the first time,
In 2004, the year Earth finally conquered Mars.

© Stuart Atkinson

Stu that link was great! Thanks.

Brilliant image to go with it. You guys are a perfect team.

Inspired...and brilliant as per your usual, gentlemen. Thank you!

Spirit & Oppy alone provide ample justification to establish a Nobel Prize in Space Systems Engineering. Stockholm, are you listening???

Great trip down memory lane! thanks

Indeed.

Today, I was on shift with Squyres as SOWG chair. At the end of the day, he pointed out that it's tonight that she landed, 8 years ago. As we did after the Columbia accident, we have named some targets on Cape York after some lost colleagues of ours... Watch out for the Greeley Pancam set and Morris Hill. Real beauts.

-m

I've enjoyed seeing where we've been but I'm looking forward to figuring out how it got there. And I'm really inspired to see where we are going.

--Bill

To put eight years in perspective, consider that it's the same amount of time that 2020 is ahead of us. In hardware terms, how many of us are using the same computer we had in 2004? The one I used back then no longer works. Early on I remember reading that rover lifespan would be limited to a year or so by loss of battery recharge capacity -- glad that didn't turn out to be true.

Many thanks to the rover designers and builders, without whose work we wouldn't be peering at a planetary surface as real as the one under our feet, and many thanks to this community -- fellow travelers on this exploration largely overlooked by the general public.

HUGE thanks to Astro0 for the beautiful picture, which is a very fitting tribute to the mission. He had to work very quickly there because I was late with my part of the project, and it looks **beautiful**!

pfff crazy! It seems like yesterday. Amazing achievement.

I remember waking up very early on a Sunday morning in Denmark, scurrying down to the baker for breakfast buns and then camping in front of my computer and watching the live web feed in the dark, before sun-up. So happy to have followed the rovers all these years, they have been a huge presence in my life!

Happy Anniversary MERs and team, my annual viewing of Roving Mars is complete, thanks for the joy and wonder...

The Spirit and Oppy Show as Entertainment

Apparently, I have been watching the Spirit and Oppy show for eight years. I watched it nearly every day, but I will be conservative and say 5 days a week. I am certain that I average over 20 minutes a day on the topic, or following links and reading other related material - but once again I will be conservative. That is 100 minutes a week! There may have been a 90 minute TV series that ran for eight years, but I wonder if anybody watched every episode.

I don't even want to talk about the time I waste on the UMSF network. Luckily I am retired and no longer have a TV.

Jack

There haven't been many 90 minute shows, but in comparison to one-hour shows or thirty-minute programs (which is probably the amount of time the average MER junky spends here) the MER Show has already beaten out I Love Lucy which ran for six years (1951-1957) and Leave It To Beaver, also six seasons (1957-1963) and just passed Dynasty which ran for eight seasons (1981-1989).

The MER Show has one more year to go before beating out The Waltons (1972-1981), two more years to go before it will pass up Baywatch (1989-2001), and four more years to equal Hawaii Five-O (1968-80). I'll try to keep everyone posted as we approach these important milestones in the longevity category.

Oh the banners crying out to be made there...

Dr Who celebrates its 50th anniversary this year*.

Just sayin'.




* (Okay, it wasn't on every year of those 50, there was a 'break' for a while, but hey, come on, have to fight our corner... )

It's also exceeded the duration of the Galileo Mission.

My granddaughter was born in the evening of January 3, 2008, 4 years nearly to the hour after Spirit landed. She celebrated her 4th birthday yesterday. She shares my interest in space exploration and the planets. It's interesting at this particular moment to see her birth as sort of an "inflection point' in the journey of the MERs on Mars!

Congratulations to the MER team and to interplanetary explorers everywhere!

But most of all, happy birthday, my sweet little Molly!

Patrick Moore will have presented 'The sky at night' every month for 55 years come April this year - the world's longest-running TV show with the same presenter - quite an achievement (I think he's missed only one show in that time) It'd be nice to think Opportunity was still going strong in 2059.....

BTW Stu didn't Doctor Who launch in '63??

Sofi Collis, the nine-year old girl who won the NASA contest to name the rovers, is now 17 years old. I wonder if she'll work on the Opportunity crew some day?

Ah. You're right, I'm a year early, sorry. Looking forward to celebrating that anniversary *and* Oppy's ninth year on Mars next year, then.

Good point about THE SKY AT NIGHT. The longevity of that series was brought up recently when a certain "misbehaving astronomer" suggested Neil deGrasse Tyson was the most well-known astronomer on the planet.

Just finished reading "Roving Mars". Had to after every sentence / paragraph related to the rover's longevity or "long term" goals.
E i g h t years ... and counting.

I can't believe how much has Mars changed in these eight years. From the timid look around of the Vikings and Pathfinder, to the vast expanses that are now more familiar than most places on Earth. Imagine how the Solar System will look like when every major body has had their equivalent "MER decade" of ground discoveries.

I had pretty much the same experience myself this past August as I my wife and I read Roving Mars together.


-- Pertinax

This birthday means that I am addicted to Mars since eight years; indeed, since the 4th of January 2004, I must have my daily dose of Martian pics.

Back then, I had prepared a file for the first 90 sols; being optimistic, I named it "Sol 1 to 100". Today, for Oppy, it's the 28th one-hundred-sols-file on my computer!! I can't imagine my life without Oppy's pics: I need my fix!!! I hope the girl will provide for a very loooooong time!

Oppy landed on my 39th birthday; it was the best gift I ever had! Many many many thanks to JPL and Nasa for this!

The nice thing about your 39th birthday (according to my dad) is that you get to be 39 for as long as you want. Oppy's age is only a number:

Hey Stu, we got spotted on Universe Today.

Happy anniversary Opportunity!!

Nice one!

But 8 years... still really having a hard time believing it's that long...

Eight years. Marvelous!

Sleep well Spirit.

Rest easy Opportunity.

We love you.

Humany Wumany

Craig

Opportuniverse Today

I finally downloaded the full-res version, great work photoshop-ing the figure eight, sure fooled me!
Poem typo alert: "..in all their restored gory.." (not in the poster, just the article)

For those who haven't seen it yet, a new HiRISE image has just ben released showing Spirit's Lander off to the side of Bonneville Crater...

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_025815_1655

(Was that a HiWISH of yours Doug?)

Here's what the lander looked like on 29 Jan...

Click to view attachment

Wouldn't it have been great if we'd had a HiRISE portrait of the lander and rover just after landing? It might have looked something like this... (I've tried to get the scale right by cloning Spirit from the same image)...

Click to view attachment

(Note: taken from: http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2012/...ories-of-spirit )

Yup. They didn't QUITE get it right - they were about 140 meters east of what I was asking for....as they didn't quite get the backshell and parachute in color as well.

I have the same request submitted for Meridiani, Color over Eagle Crater.

Here's an attempt to tweak the color to look similar to what an overhead view might look like:

Click to view attachment

Beautiful colours, ugordan, as ever...

The new HiRISE image inspired a new astropoem, which is here if anyone wants to have a look...

http://astropoetry.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/freeing-spirit

And here is color interpretation from NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/mult...a/pia15038.html

Natural or not, those earthy brown tones from the NASA rendering are more pleasing to my eye than the orange-red versions.

That's actually the source image I used.

I'm not an expert at all in optics, but I suppose that even if the ambient light is very red, in low light levels the black and white vision (rods) is more efficient that the color vision (cones). So, when displaying an image with normal Earth brighness levels, lower saturation may preserve better the original visual experience.

Here's my version:

Click to view attachment

In GIMP:
1. Go to Balance color and slide the tree balances +10 towards red and -10 towards yellow.
2. In Hue and saturation, drop saturation -40.
3. In Brightness and contrast, +20 brightness and +30 contrast.

Or, in other words - we're guessing and it's just an artistic judgement call.

This is it... tested and approved on VL1 and VL2 images at JPL-IPL in 1981-1982

Here a few images showing Spirit's lander
I convolved the HiRise image (source HighView) with a little Lucy-Richardson tool
Click to view attachment

Here is Spirit from Sol6 (Nasa/JPL) on the lander. It is rotated it to keep the north/south line about right with the HiRise image
Spirit eventually rotated and exited on the west ramp (left). There was a potential hazard on the southern ramp with the airbag to the right of the south ramp.
Click to view attachment

Here is the Sol16 'empty nest' image (Nasa/JPL). We are looking roughly Northeast over the lander, part of Bonneville is at the top right of the image. The prominent west ramp was the exit ramp.
Click to view attachment

Always wanted to make a poster in the 'spirit' of Stu and Astro0...
Click to view attachment
enjoy...

To celebrate in France "Eight Years" of roving the red planet, here is one image recently published by some French magazines... Enjoy !
(+ link to the context : http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=182776 )
Click to view attachment

Monsieur VikingMars,
Mon Dieu! C'est tres magnifique!