Well, rats.

Six years, huh? Whaddya expect for 400 million dollars, anyway?

After six highly successful years of exploring the red sands of Mars, NASA's rover Spirit will rove no more.

With its six wheels stuck in powdery sand and two wheels no longer working, the resilient little explorer will become a fixed, immobile scientific observatory -- if it can survive the harsh temperatures of the upcoming winter.

"Its driving days are likely over," Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said in a telephone news conference Tuesday. "Its contributions will continue" if it can be re-awakened after what could be a six-month hibernation during the Martian winter.

If Spirit can be resuscitated, researchers will use it to attempt to answer one of their most pressing questions: whether the planet has a solid iron core or a liquid one.

It's gone rogue!

That, or the Martians got tired of it driving all over their yards....

On the 1,800th Martian day of its mission, NASA’s Spirit rover blanked out, and it remains a bit disoriented.

Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reported Wednesday that the Spirit had behaved oddly on Sunday — the 1,800th Sol, or Martian day, since Spirit’s landing on Mars in January 2004.

[snip]

On that day, the Spirit acknowledged receiving its driving directions from Earth, but it did not move.

More strangely, the Spirit had no memory of what it had done for that part of Sol 1800. The rover did not record actions, as it otherwise always does, to the part of its computer memory that retains information even when power is turned off, the so-called nonvolatile memory. “It’s almost as if the rover had a bout of amnesia,” said John Callas, the project manager for the rovers.

[snip]

On Monday, mission controllers told the Spirit to orient itself by locating the Sun in the sky with its camera, and it reported that it had been unable to do so. Dr. Callas said the camera did actually photograph the Sun, but it was not quite in the position the rover expected.

One hypothesis is that a cosmic ray hit the electronics and scrambled the rover’s memory. On Tuesday, the rover’s nonvolatile memory worked properly.

The Spirit now reports to be in good health and responds to commands from Earth.

Right. Just watch what kind of messages it starts sending back from now on out: Mars is a really awful place, and: No, there aren't any life forms about, and: Humans should never travel there....

We can still build some things to work well

(CNN) -- NASA's Mars rovers are celebrating their fifth birthday on the Red Planet -- exceeding their original life span by four years and nine months -- with no end yet in sight to their history-making work.

The rover Spirit landed on January 3, 2004, with Opportunity touching down 21 days later.

NASA said the rovers had made important discoveries about the wet and violent conditions on ancient Mars.

They had returned 250,000 images, covered more than 21km (13 miles), climbed a mountain, descended into craters, struggled with sand traps and ageing hardware and survived dust storms, NASA said.

"These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day," said John Callas, Jet Propulsion Laboratory project manager for Spirit and Opportunity.

"We realize that a major rover component on either vehicle could fail at any time and end a mission with no advance notice but on the other hand, we could accomplish the equivalent duration of four more prime missions on each rover in the year ahead."

Will we be able to find our 'Can Do' spirit after eight years of rewarding incompetence and avarice? The spirit that got us to the moon?

Yes. We can.