Spirit Sends First Photo Since Troubles Began

Space.com ^ | 01/29/04 | Robert Roy Britt

[Pikamax]

Spirit Sends First Photo Since Troubles Began By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 09:19 am ET 29 January 2004

NASA's troubled rover Spirit has sent a new photograph back from Mars. It is the robot's first significant data transmission since its computer went haywire last week.

The image was taken and sent back Wednesday. It was captured by the rover's front hazard avoidance camera and shows the robotic arm extended to a rock previously named Adirondack. Mission managers did not say whether it was an indicator of Spirit's health.

Images

This image from Spirit was taken and sent to Earth on Wednesday, Jan. 28. It is the first picture to be returned by the rover since computer problems began last week.

Spirit's science operations halted just as it crawled to the pointy rock and was about to begin drilling into it. The rover's computer rebooted itself more than 100 times over a two-day period and, at first, sent back beeps but no data. Engineers have since determined that the problem appears to involve too many files overloading the onboard computer memory.

A spectrometer, which would identify minerals in the rock, is still placed on Adirondack, as it had been instructed prior to the computer glitch.

"Engineers are working to restore Spirit to working order so that the rover can resume the scientific exploration of its landing area," a NASA statement accompanying the picture said. No other details have been provided about the rover's condition since a Wednesday morning press briefing.

"Right now we're working to get complete control of the vehicle, and we're still not quite there," Jennifer Trosper, Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said earlier Wednesday. "If we're on the right track, we hope to be back doing some science by early next week. If we're not on the right track, it could take longer than that."

Spirit is in the Gusev Crater on Mars. Its twin, Opportunity, is on the other side of the planet and preparing to roll off its landing pad, possibly as early as Sunday.

The combined mission cost is $820 million and is designed to determine whether Mars was once wetter, possibly with the conditions necessary for life.

[xrp]

[Guillermo]

Thank God it's working again!

[Paradox]

Its probably something more like:

[ALASKA]

That's what I thought!!!

[theFIRMbss]

>Spirit Sends First Photo Since Troubles Began

[blam]

NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity Begins Standing Up

[Styria]

When I had a Cyrex processor, NT would often do memory dumps into my mIRC logs when it crashed. It was amazing to see how old some of the information in those dumps was.

[SirChas]

NASA finally received the picture from Spirit that caused the problem. Now that it has been purged, all will be well.

[Jonah Hex]

"Dang critters keep getting in and chewing up the wires!"

[Michael Barnes]

man, it has to suck going through life that ugly.

[Jaxter]

Thanks. After seeing that photo I believe I'm going to have to go purge myself.

[Tijeras_Slim]

I'm saving that to use as a screensaver.... the IT guys will love it.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

ping

[Texans]

Someone needs to draw a cartoon of the twin robot "rebooting" Spirit.

[TalBlack]

NASA's troubled rover Spirit has sent a new photograph back from Mars. It is the robot's first significant data transmission since its computer went haywire last week.

With this comeback the Brits are learning that you don't shoot for Mars on the cheap. 800mil vs 50mil, Spirit working after fault, Beagle MIA.

[antiRepublicrat]

It's actually VxWorks, a real-time embedded OS, in this case running on a PowerPC. It is mostly unrelated to either *NIX or Windows, although its networking was essentially ported from BSD.

There's no user/protected mode switching, no resource reclamation, no multitasking (only multithreading), no round-robin preemption (instead interrupt driven), nothing. The programmer has to do pretty much everything. But the tradeoff is that it has extremely low interrupt latency, and context switching is practically instant. Important stuff for a real-time OS running on a 20 MHz chip.

Most likely the programmers screwed something up.

[Cardini]

I will be sending you a cleanup bill from the vomit that has sprayed all over my office. You should be ashamed!

Just kidding, that has got to be the most pig ugly POS I have ever seen. Gads!

[Truth666]

Now that's where the real trouble begins :
when soon the first martian will be spotted down there
http://engforum.pravda.ru/attachment.php3?postid=610375

[FreedomFarmer]

Shucks, I figured it was Tourist Guy.