I think the girls will do fine after the dust storm stops. Those solar panels are probably smoother than any natural surface on Mars, and will probably stay pretty clean overall given some modest winds. Being so high off the ground is another advantage, since any dust grains too big to be physically lofted probably won't get a chance to saltate, or bounce, on top of the panels.

Once we're immobile, I think a great experiment would be to watch the solar panels with the MI and see exactly how the dust on the panels evolve over time. Maybe they start as really small grains, and as they start to stick together, they get blown around and eventually fall off?

They may be twins, but Spirit's a boy, Opportunity's a girl.

That's funny, I always thought of it the other way around...

I've always thought of both of them as girls, with Spirit as a gloomy goth girl, dresses in black and writes dark poetry, while OpportunityGrrl is way too cute and happy. That perception may have something to do with reading their early blogs:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/spiritrover
http://www.livejournal.com/users/opportunitygrrl

I need this dust storm to be so over.

It's cabin fever. We need to get those girls moving!

(I think they're both girls, like Power Puff Girls, hehe)

I've always thought of Spirit as Aeryn Sun off FARSCAPE - gutsy space marine type, what with all that charging up and down hills and diving around ledges, and Oppy as more like STARGATE's Sam Carter, brilliant scientist but with a giddy, geeky love of exploration...

(Steve S, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease get the rovers moving again, we're starting to gnaw at the walls in here...!!!)

There was never a clear consensus on this among the team. However the JPL director (Charles Elachi) agrees with you. His rationale was that the French words for Spirit and Opportunity are masculine and feminine, respectively.

Thank you Mark

Vive la difference!

Roy

I believe Steve Squires quoted in the Roving Mars moving that Spirit was "The Problem Child", and Opportunity "Little Miss Perfect", I guess that kind of fits your descriptions...

I guess all this free time we find ourselves with is driving some of us balmy. I've always assumed that vessels of discovery were feminine. I thought that captains always referred to their ships as "she," regardless of the name. Has that changed?

If ever there was a convenient spot for me to drop out of Lurkspace and engage the much-admired UMSF MER crowd, this is it. The gender-specific pronoun question is both fascinating and hilarious...I've always considered spacecraft to be somewhat androgynous (excepting the unfortunate docking analogies alluded to by Arthur C. Clarke in "2010"). Strange how most of the program/vehicle nomenclature in NASA's pantheon have been masculine by the convention of naming missions after scientists, mythological figures, or "professions"; yet the machines themselves are anthropormorphized as female. As this is likely steering things further in the direction of being off-topic, I'll move to the subject at hand...

I've been following this storm with great worry and interest, and strongly empathize with the people who post here regularly. Whether boys or girls, I hope to see these astonishing rovers survive and continue their contributions to what may well be remembered as the Platinum Age of planetary exploration.

Thank you to everyone in these forums for your excellent images and personal observations.

[...]

First of all... disambiguate - it's my new favorite word!



Now, on the gender of language... It's one thing to have the masculine and the feminine in speach. I don't speak a language with a gender bias so I'll ask - does that actaully translate into thinking of the object as male or female? Seams a bit absurd. Are trees dudes to spanish speakers?

Anyway, I have never thought of the rovers as people or having gender. I try not to anthropomorphize them too much. It would make it harder for me to watch them struggle through this adventure. I perfer to think of the earthlings that are directing them. And, of course, they are male and female (mostly male for some reason).

This has been quite the glorious adventure. I'm hopeful that it isn't quite over, yet...

A very interesting point, that I have not heard made anywhere else. Redundancy... I love it.

I don't believe so... some discussion here. I do recall there being things that are jarringly wrongly gendered to our traditional stereotypes, but I can't think of any offhand.

I think the feminine aspect of ships comes from large numbers of men having to spend way too much time away from the fairer sex. So they "love" their ship, and "get married" to the job, so to speak. Engineering being mostly male, and space vehicles being vessels of exploration, and many of them ending up "married to the job", I guess the feminine aspect tends to come up again. I've always viewed Spirit and Opportunity as sisters, and explained as such to my 4 year old son. Of course, he doesn't understand and is a little jealous that one isn't a boy!

On the "jarringly wrong" front, I dimly recall from HS German class that German for "little girl" is actually gender-neutral, since the -chen ending by default makes it so. See here for more German oddities: http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa042098.htm

Apologies to those who are getting bored by the linguistic gender topic but I don't think grammatical gender causes a speaker to map the nouns in question conceptually in terms of physical gender. Some good examples that I can think of from own mother tongue, Irish, are the word for girl, cailín, which is masculine and the word for boy scout, gasóg, which is feminine. The gender of nouns in Irish has a significant effect on its declension which is another source of additonal redundancy as per Jrehling's comment. Irish takes an approach to such things that is akin to the security principle of "defence in depth" - if it is at all possible to add complexity then we added it.

They're robots.

But robots can have gender too -- just ask nprev about 'little Bender'.

Sunspot, I think your browser's playing up; it sees to have omitted a smiley from your post, which makes it look like you're seriously suggesting they're just machines, and obviously that would be, well, silly... a bit like saying Serenity or Enterprise are "just spaceships"...

Perhaps in moderated fora all long discussions die in semantic and grammatical debates. It's still better than long discussions dying in flamewars. In that spirit, you're all beyond contempt unless you consider Spirit and Opportunity best represented as land tortoises.

tortoises are hot!

That Martian storm has much to answer for!

This whole discussion shows the wretched thing has given us all way too much time on hands. If Spirit and Opportunity don't get a hurry up and find some new rocks for us to discuss we'll soon be reduced to discussing the colour of Opportunity's rivets or whether Spirit & Oppy really are identical twins or mere fraternals.

=====
Stephen

Bloody well said, Mongo! Oppy's definitely a fembot, but very much into her career...pity. I really like the way she rolls!

It's really very simple to tell the gender of the robots -- just check whether they use testosteroil or femzoil!

BTW -- ships are referred to in the feminine gender in only some cultures. I have it on good authority that any Russian sailor you may meet would say that his ship, he is a good ship. He is a strong ship. He serves well the Rodina.

Then again, maybe Russian just has more masculine nouns than other languages. I probably ought not speculate -- the only two phrases in Russian I know are "na gavareet Russki" (which means, in pidgin Russian, "I don't speak Russian,") and another one that I know how to spell and how to pronounce, but I dare not repeat here since I know we have at least one Russian speaker here. And it's one of the rather nastier epithets found in the language, as I understand. All I will say is that it is a comment on one's mat.



-the other Doug

Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that. I can't speak for sailors in particular, but for us land dwellers it depends on the exact word being used. "Kohrabl'" (Russian for "ship", especially when the ship in question is military) is masculine, "soodno" (Russian for something like "vessel", i.e. a general term) is neuter, and "lodka" (Russian for "boat") is feminine.

So, when I say (in equivalent Russian) "this ship was ...", I use masculine, when I say "this vessel was ...", I use neuter, and when I say "this boat was ...", I use feminine.

But there's also a question of the craft's name. So when I say "Mary Celeste was ...", I use feminine, but when I say "Admiral Kuznetsov was ...", I use masculine.



Something like "no speak Russian", yes.



Does it consist of two words, both beginning with 's'? Then rest assured that there are a lot of nastier epithets in Russian.

Going back to topic--I think of Spirit as a "he" because: 1) the English word "Spirit" sounds masculine to a Russian ear, 2) the corresponding Russian word "dookh" is masculine. "Opportunity", on the other hand, sounds vaguely feminine, while the Russian word for "Mars rover" ("marsokhod") is masculine, so I'm slightly torn. There's also the Russian media, who usually call them "Mars rover Spirit" and "Mars rover Opportunity", which, I guess, is one way of solving the problem.

What about the gender of Cassini or Deep Impact or LRO etc etc.

(just to throw you all a curve ball)

Doug

Neutral; all of them are a LOT harder to anthromorphize than the MERs!