Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

One of the wheels on Nasa's Martian rover Spirit has stopped working.

The robotic vehicle is now dragging the wheel as it moves to a slope where it can get maximum sunshine on its solar cells to sustain it through the winter.

Spirit's right-front wheel has played up before because of a lubrication problem, but engineers on Earth where able to return it to normal operation.

This time, however, it appears to be the motor that rotates the wheel that has ceased to function.

"It is not drawing any current at all," said Jacob Matijevic, rover engineering team chief at the US space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The Beeb