SPACE EXPLORATION Saturn takes spotlight, but Mars research goes on
The Mars rovers are still rolling.
HARTFORD COURANT
Like a bejeweled fashion model strutting the runway, Saturn has been making pretty for the cameras of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, which entered the planet's orbit at the end of last month. But as it flaunts its rings and beckons with its 31 moons, has this pretty planet stolen the spotlight from our neighbor?
Mars has spent a solid year as the solar system's media darling. It veered in for the closest flyby of Earth in 60,000 years. It swallowed up a British lander. It played host to two scrappy NASA rovers, and then revealed its watery past.
Upstaged
But once its front-page glamour shots were replaced by Saturn's ghostly halos, star-struck observers could be forgiven for asking, Mars who?
Yet, like a Hilary Duff toiling in the shadows of a Lindsay Lohan, the pursuit of science on Mars proceeds apace.
"Every once in a while people will ask me, are those rovers still up there?" said Mark Adler, a Mars mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
In fact, half a year after they hit Martian dust, the rovers Spirit and Opportunity are still rolling, and could do so for another year, Adler said. With the martian winter bearing down, they're on reduced-energy diets to keep warm at night.
And one of Spirit's front wheels is sticking -- if a "3,000-meter tune-up" doesn't fix the problem, the rover may have to drive backward, dragging the offending wheel.
But as Spirit prepares to move up into the Columbia Hills (named after the lost shuttle) and its twin on the other side of the planet goes deeper into a crater about a mile from its landing site, their minders can already look back with pride on the mission's accomplishments.
The highlight "certainly had to have been the unequivocal evidence of an ancient water environment on Mars that was perhaps deep and long-lived," Adler said.