Roving Mars Page #6

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We don't know what will kill these rovers,

They do get old, Motors break,

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Lubrication goes away in the motors,

the wheels may stop turning,

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We have no idea what will happen,

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But they're not gonna last forever,

and as the dust keeps falling,

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the solar arrays keep getting dirty,

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What could happen with time is someday

we won't be able to charge the batteries

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to keep the rover warm at night,

and if that happens, it'll get too cold,

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and one morning, it just won't wake up,

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''Spirit'' and ''Opportunity''

have shown us that once,

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three to four billion years ago,

Mars had the essential ingredients for life,

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so the next step is to seek out

evidence of life itself,

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Right now we have

one example of life - us,

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We may be all there is,

We simply don't know,

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But if you can show that life developed

twice in one solar system,

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and then you consider the multitude

of solar systems out there,

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it takes no great leap of imagination

to believe that life might be

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a common phenomenon

throughout the universe,

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Our rovers have gone farther,

harder and longer

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than even we, their creators,

believed possible,

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They've done heroic work,

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But someday we won't need robots,

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Someday there'll be humans

on the surface of Mars,

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and boot prints in our wheel tracks,

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This mission has put us

on a great trajectory

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to learn more about Mars

and about ourselves,

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But right now ''Spirit'' and ''Opportunity''

are still roving Mars,

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lt's not just that they've

exceeded our wildest dreams -

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in many ways

they iare/i our wildest dreams,

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