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June 26, 2009 Free Spirit
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Subtitle: Bringing Mars to Earth
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John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager: We're here in our test facility at JPL trying to help Spirit on the surface of Mars.
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Spirit had become embedded in some loose, soft material and the rover is having difficulty extracting herself.
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So what we've done, since we can't send people to Mars to help the rover, we're bringing Mars down here to Earth.
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So we're in the process of recreating the conditions where Spirit is stuck in this facility.
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The soil where Spirit has trouble moving is a very light, fluffy material.
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So what we've done is develop a simulant here at JPL, from a constituent of different materials,
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and we're creating that material -- producing, mixing it -- and spreading it in our test box here,
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and then conditioning the soil, landscaping it, if you will, to be just like the terrain on Mars.
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And then we'll take our engineering rover which is just like Spirit, the exact same size, 
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and we'll put out engineering rover into this facility, deliberately embed it the same way Spirit is stuck.
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And then experiment with extracting, trying to get the rover out. Trying to figure out what works here before we do it for real on Mars
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because there's always a risk that something we may try actually may make things worse and we want to avoid that.
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So we want to find out what things work, what doesn't and avoid the things that don't work and focus on the things that do work.
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We expect that it'll take some time for us to complete the testing here at JPL and then to actually extract Spirit on the surface of Mars.
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So we will be regularly updating you on the progress both here on the ground and on the surface of Mars.
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I'm John Callas, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers, here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology
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