News of the Weird
NASA Rover Imitates Hollywood Sitcom
By Bob Hudson
Jan 27, 2010 - 9:12:23 AM

NASA's embattled Mars rover “Spirit” managed its first small, yet successful, climb as it tries to escape a Martian sand trap that has plagued it since May 6, 2009. The Martian misadventure eerily parallels the plot of a season two episode of CBS-TV’s hit comedy “The Big Bang Theory”. In that 2008 episode, lusty Howard Wolowitz thinks he's finally found his soul mate. That is, until the woman, Dr. Stephanie Barnett, meets Leonard. To compete for her hand, Howard invites her to drive the Mars rover, which promptly winds up stuck in a ditch. Now, that couldn’t happen in real life. Or could it?

NASA announced last week that the intrepid Martian rover managed to lift itself by nearly half an inch during its latest two drive attempts this month, and while that seems like a small step, it's the first upward motion for the rover since escape attempts began in November. The rover managed to move a little more than 2 inches backwards in the maneuver. Spirit's left-middle wheel stalled on Tuesday during yet another drive attempt. The news comes as NASA engineers run through a short list of remaining options to try and rescue Spirit from the wheel-deep sand it sank into in 2009.

The escape efforts have been on since November, but until now, Spirit has only been spinning its wheels forward in attempts to free itself. Now engineers are commanding the rover to spin its wheels in reverse. They are also directing Spirit to turn its wheels from side-to-side every now and then in a so-called “frog kick” maneuver to knock nearby Martian dirt loose and improve traction. An incredibly expensive version of trying to rock your car out of snow here on Earth. So far, the rover has backtracked across all the forward distance it achieved in the last two months of forward driving attempts. Spirit is now 1.4 inches south of its location when the rover began its escape drives in November, mission managers said. After the January 14th move, Spirit's northward tilt actually improved, only to slide backwards during the second drive on the 16th. NASA might want to watch more episodes of the Chuck Lorre Production to guide the Rover program.

Back in Hollywood, Wolowitz gets his just desserts. He desperately destroys all the security tapes and hard drives related to the Mars Rover mission, to hide evidence of his unsuccessful attempt to win the woman. His comeuppance comes at the end of the episode, when he hears the news that the Mars rover has found life on Mars in the bottom of the ditch, but as so much data has been mysteriously lost no one will ever know who made the amazing discovery. Co-creator and producer Chuck Lorre probably heard of the NASA reenactment of his episode and wet himself.