Nasa rover breaks down on Mars

BBC ^ | 22 January, 2004

[traumer]

Nasa's Mars rover Spirit has stopped sending useful data to Earth from the Red Planet and mission scientists are unable to send it commands.

Nasa says the problem could either be due to a major power fault, software corruption or memory corruption. Scientists has tried several times to communicate with the rover but has received either very little or no data.

The vehicle has entered a fault mode and Nasa is now devising a strategy for getting back in contact with Spirit. "This is a serious problem. This is an extremely serious anomaly," said Pete Theisinger Spirit project manager. "There is no single fault that explains all the observables."

Spirit's twin rover Opportunity is due to land on the surface of Mars on 25 January at 0530 GMT.

At around 0430 GMT on Thursday, the Mars Global Surveyor probe received a signal from the rover suggesting that its radio was on.

But Spirit was only transmitting "pseudo-noise", a random series of zeroes and ones in binary code and not anything the scientists could decipher. The scientists had reported a bad communications link on Wednesday when they tried to send commands to the rover.

But this was initially put down to bad weather over a radio telescope in Canberra, Australia which was sending the signals to the Red Planet. It now appears the problems could have had some other cause.

Deputy project manager Richard Cook said: "Effectively what it means is the radio was on but the computer wasn't sending information over to it."

On Wednesday, Nasa received two five-minute-long beeps or signals from the Rover on Mars that confirmed it had received commands from Earth.

But Nasa has not received data from the rover for more than 24 hours. Mission scientists will now try to send commands to the rover to try to get it to respond.

[farmfriend]

ping

[billorites]

[princess leah]

Should have used energizer batteries! (you know where the bunny just keeps going and going...)

[ElkGroveDan]

I hate be an I-told-you-so after the fact kind of person, but the dilly-dallying the first few days really bothered me. When you have a remote craft the possibility of unexpected failure is way up there. They should have gotten off the lander right away and used the RAT grinder as soon as possible. The fear of the air bag obstruction was way overrated and they wasted about three days on that. If the craft does indeed fail completely, I hope that Opprtunity will be dispatched and put to work a lot quicker next week.

[demnomo]

Gray aliens from the Mars base must have snagged it. Yeah, that's the ticket. ;)

[John Beresford Tipton]

"Nasa rover breaks down on Mars"

ONSTAR, May I help you?

[6ppc]

Didn't someone post an article a few days ago saying that the rover was running Linux?

<8^)

hee, hee...couldn't help myself!

[BlueLancer]

I'm so angry ... very angry indeed ...
Run over my flowers will they ...

[Ron in Acreage]

NASA should do what liberals do when the going gets tough. Give up and quit! Seriously, now we have an excuse to send a man there. To fix it!

[marron]

Is it still under warranty?

[biblewonk]

LMAO

[DB]

It sounds like they may have uploaded bad data to it.

Considering it apparently failed immediately after they sent new commands to it.

[cynicalman]

No doubt built by either Ford or GM

[InterceptPoint]

JAVA!!!!!

[traumer]

"JAVA!!!!!"

Place of origin India.... ?

[smith288]

JAVA!!!!!

So it can slow the system to a crawl and make any native applications crash??? ;)

[Consort]

Explore Mars with Maestro (Linux)

[newgeezer]

ROTFLMAO, too, especially at the series thoughts of sending any more space junk (or people) there.

Typical government program. Let's throw more taxpayer money at it! (Maybe the nth time is the charm.)

[dc-zoo]

I bet they wish they hadn't waited so long sitting on the lander. Now we may never know if that was a patch of mud near the lander.