The editorial in The New York Times says goodbye to a loyal servant, Spirit:
After a final attempt last week, NASA has stopped trying to make contact with the Mars rover called Spirit, which was last heard from in March of 2010 as the Martian winter was setting in. Hopes of hearing more from Spirit were slim even then, but there is a difference between not hearing and no longer listening.
Spirit was a spectacular success. A three-month mission, beginning in 2004, turned into six years of exploration. Even the accidents were profitable. When Spirit bogged down, permanently, at a location called Troy, efforts to free it revealed unexpected subsurface sulfates, which scientists believe are part of the Mars water cycle.
This is not like calling off the search for a missing human explorer. Yet it feels similar, even though Spirit is a six-wheeled robotic vehicle, not even remotely human in appearance, even by Wall-E standards. Still, it is strangely easy to personify Spirit. Over the years, it has seemed intrepid, valiant, even determined. It has no consciousness, but there has been something self-knowing in the photographs it has taken of itself, with Mars in the background. In its plight— stuck on the edge of a small crater tens of millions of miles from Earth— we feel a celestial solitude, as if we were marooned there ourselves.
What made Spirit all these things, of course, were the engineers and scientists who built and operated it, who reveled in the data it returned and who did their best to keep it running, year after year. The most human thing about Spirit, after all, was the impulse that sent it to Mars in the first place, a planet we now know in a way that would have seemed unimaginable only a decade ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment