wow! they found another rock on mars

waste of money!

War! What is it goood for!?

Perhaps Opportunity could use Spirit for spare parts? Maybe Spirit's sacrifice is a good thing.

Yes, fuck Spirit, fuck Mars, fuck Space and Stars, build more missiles to kill stuff.

Not. :(

I recon. Total waste of money on Mars. We need the $5b/month to kill Iraqis/terrorists there.

seems to be a popularity contest that Spirit lost.

Poor Wall-E...

Release its control to open source, let the interweb control it.

They should turn over control to a non-profit space research organization, possibly a university, s.e.d.s, other.
Seems like such a waste if they just stop using it.

I salute this intrepid Robot Scout and the work it's done on the red planet.
Expectations: Exceeded +
My condolences to the team.

Hopefully it can be configured to do some cool automated task(s) that can be monitored informally until it is unable to do so on it's own any more.

They should have had a battlemodo to the death between Opportunity and Spirit. Only the strong survive.

A bit sad that all that we accomplished that we have added liter to yet another planet. So much for going green! Let's screw up another eco-system. First we destroy our planet and now we add to another. Isnt it kind of irresponsible to just leave it? Can we at least use it to stream iTunes to the rest of the universe or can we send hot photos of porn starts to aliens?

At 25 000$ a pop for a cheap "targeted" bomb. The military could save the 4 millions for NASA in like what...a month or two?

If they come back to it in a couple years and the aliens decided to adopt it. But because they were bored with is there going to be a bunch of NASA guys kicking dirt

John Mayer here.

Wow! Even after it got its own Imax movie and everything! Maybe if there's enough of a public outcry, they'll reverse course, as they did with the service mission to Hubble. On the other hand, the Rover has already lived beyond its expected span, and might be in worse shape than researchers are letting on. Given the robot's celebrity, this might be part of a plan to allow the robot to die with a little dignity and privacy, rather than have it stumble over a rock and fall on its butt with its little wheels spinning in the air like dying insect legs with the whole world watching.

Battlebots On Mars

"Two droids enter, but only one can slowly roll away."

Wow, sad in a way. But considering the rovers were spec'd to run a mission of only 90 days, and they've gotten four years' research out of each of them, I'd have to say it was a considerable return on our investment.

It's truly a shame though that they couldn't find a paltry (in comparison to the money flushed away daily by our feckless leaders) $4M to keep it rolling...

Nicely done overall though, NASA.

meanwhile we're spending BILLIONS and BILLIONS every single day to kill people on the other side of our own planet.

America, a country with priorities.

@ineedattention: "So much for going green! Let's screw up another eco-system."

Uhh.. Could you please define "Eco-System"? For an eco-system to be considered an Eco-System, don't you first need some form of... oh I dunno... Life?

NASA has had no reason to exist since 1969.
come to think of it, that's when they stopped making any good decisions as well.

@stoleriko:
What the fuck R U talking about?!?

I know that some people have never left the town they grew up in, and can never conceive of the future in any other light than the dim little one that illuminates their own little tiny 6x6 corner of the world, but this IS your future; along with all of humanity.

Mars is the closest thing we have to our own home planet and decades and decades from now your children's children's children, maybe even your children's, children's, children's children might be colonizing Mars. The likelihood of this happening is great; which is why they have spend so many billions of dollars over the past decades to fund research on Mars, its atmosphere, surface and the feasibility of humans living on Mars for extended periods.

They're gonna be pissed when Spirit becomes self-aware and makes its own army of robots and sends them to Earth. We're so robo-raped.

@Spaceboy: John Mayer here.

Spaceboy: how can you be anti-NASA with a name like Spaceboy???

Where can I make a donation?

@enine: Actually... I agree with that. That would rock.

Why the hell are we stopping anything on Mars now?!? With the way that we're destroying the Earth right now, we'll need another planet as a backup pretty soon. Additionally, with the constant increase in population on this planet, we're fast approaching the carrying capacity of the Earth. My guess is that by about 2150 or so, there will be at least a billion people on Mars, if not more. Terraforming will have to begin within the next 50 years, and colonization within 100. The moon will need to have a spaceport there soon, to get to Mars and beyond more easily. This is the future of humanity, whether we like it or not, and the world needs to look forward and acknowledge this. We need to invest massive resources in space, starting now.

@frigg: He wants to grow up to be a Russian Cosmonaut. CCCP!

Anyway, it's sad that they have to kill Spirit. The first mars rover died out on its own while these two have been chugging strong for 4 years without much incident. I hope they at least gave Spirit a nice battery conditioner so it can possibly be reused when they get the money.

Also, will they dream?

@Out2gtcha: I think he was joking, but your points are still valid.

Love the photoshop.

I think the rationale behind this decision is that the damn thing has performed ridiculously well, and will not die. They were expecting this program to run dry years ago, but due to the fact that the rovers keep soldiering on, they just can't simply continue to shovel money into the project. I think we're fantastically lucky that we get to keep one battle rover.

Dang nature, you scary!

$4 million is 16 minutes of the iraq war (based on $133 billion/year)

Is it really doing to die, or it is just not going to perform any more tasks for a while? No reason for it not to be activated at a later date if we need it, and, it will stand as a monument to what has been accomplished. Someday, somewhere, this will show up on Antuques Roadshow (the Mars Edition) and will be treasured much as we view the pyramids today.

basically everyone who said that this cutback is going to prevent us from colonizing mars is an idiot in two-fold ways.

one: nobody wants to live there, didn't you see total recall, wtf

two: the rover has been up there for 4 years, it's probably played out its usefulness in gathering data. nasa probably cut it to play off the sympathies of pathetic nerds and to make way for the next bigger and better rover

NASA can't even afford to give the machine instructions? How much could that possibly cost?

The government doesn't even count numbers as low as $4m.

Meanwhile, mission accomplished in Iraq. USA! USA!

@workingonyourinvoice:
I hope so, but the "waste of money! " comment didnt exactly come off as a joke if it was.

Guess they need the funds to stage another moon landing

This concept of "WUV" confuses and INFURIATES US!!!

@strider_mt2k: Open Source that bad boy. Let the (vetted) tech community have at it for a while. I'd wager it could still be put to some good use, even in private hands - (granted they'd have to share communications gear probably)...

In the future, when we send people to Mars, they will have to use the 56k modem on this robot to contact their shuttle. Communication will have been cut-off by another, evil, robot. Also, they will find bugs on Mars and Val Kilmer will be there.

That's how I understand it, at least.

@Buehler: Of course, I'm following on what enine said cause I didn't RTFC.

@stoleriko: Sad.

It's pathetic that we can fund wars with billions in the blink of an eye but can't fund scientific exploration with a fraction of that.

Have they found anything useful recently? Seems to me that whatever capabilities they had that were intended to be used during the 90-day mission have been exhausted by 4 years of work. They are doing the same type of digging over and over again. Save the money and send another rover with different capabilities.

That is too bad.

Explore, adapt, survive. Manifest Destiny bitches!

Decades from now, when humans finally land on Mars, they will find an evolved deadly killer robot that for some reason hates all humans and wants to kill them with single minded deadly passion. It will call itself Spee-Art.

It's pathetic that we can fund wars with billions in the blink of an eye but can't fund .

At $5,000 a second for the Iraq war, we could simply pause the fighting for less than 15 minutes to pay for Spirit.

And who would give up the technical capacity to operate on Mars for $4 million? Honestly? Say you want to do something a year down the road that could conceivably be done by Spirit. Think of the astronomical (no pun intended) cost of getting another vehicle to another freaking planet rather than maintaining the one you've got there now. I know Americans lease and flip their cars like it's going out of style, but space robots too? Go us.

@jw: And Trinity, too.

If'n it can't kill Islamofascists, it ain't no good for nuthin.

buhs

Man, Steve Jobs is amazing. He somehow convinced Congress to screw NASA into abandoning a robot just to promote the upcoming Wall-E movie from Pixar.

Is there anything he can't do?

"No, Stephanie! No disassemble Number Five!"

I wonder how much NASA spends on global warming research and how much that cuts into programs such as this. It is a shame that NASA doesn't have its priorities straight

Remember, these things were meant for a 4 month mission, and thusly have limited capability. Yes, they have survived for an unbelievable 4 years, which is a great achievment. But with that extended lifespan has come extended cost of operation, which having two doing the same limited tasks (that have already been done and redone numerous times now, I am sure) is just a waste. I sure as shit don't want to pay for that. Prove to me that we are getting new and useful data out of having two of these things doing whatever they do, and I am all for it. If it could be parked somewhere that continued to charge it's batteries while keeping it safe from the elements, perhaps it could be fired up at a later date for another mission.

Doesn't Spirit only have 5 working wheels these days?

Hopefully they can start it moving again, once they locate a Martian mechanic

Don't you guys see what this is?
IT'S A DAMN CONSPIRACY!
What really happened is they found a transformer or Marvin the Martian and all of a sudden, "We don't have a budget"

Google should just buy the whole Mars command center, plus hire all the employees just to keep this mission going...They won't have any trouble finding directions: [mars.google.com]

they're not actually shutting them down, spirit is going to sleep for a while and opportunity is going to relax with less tasks...

lets just send some mechs

Sooo, why aren't any of you upset that it takes $20 million a year to control two robots and receive data?

The robots are paid for; the antennas are paid for; so what is left($820 million)? Very expensive scientist that now only control 1 part-time robot. Why can't NASA be more efficient?

I say let some high school or college kids drive them for awhile.

RTFM:

Spirit is parked on a sunny slope for the Martian winter and was going to gather atmospheric measurements before the budget cut. Instead, it will now stay in sleep mode for most of the winter and stop all science gathering.

Sleep during the winter, not shutdown

It's got to be a lot cheaper to keep 'em running that to send another one up sometime in the future. Surely for that reason alone it's worth keeping them ticking along.