Mars Rover in "Safe-Mode" - JPL

Spaceflight Now.com ^ | 01/22/2004 | Spaceflight Now

[Hiwayman]

Spirit ain't dead yet...looks like it went into a protective state until NASA/JPL can find out what happened!

[farmfriend]

ping

[commish]

This is a typical fail-safe setup for any remotely operated equipment. The machine will basically shut itself down until it can be (to put it simply) "rebooted".

[oceanview]

just reboot the thing.

[Riley]

"It is a pretty smart machine that we have up there and the key thing that we are going to do next is to communicate with it tomorrow morning and ask it to send us some data down so we can do a diagnostic of what's the problem," Elachi said.

Lets give R. Lee Ermey a microphone and a radio and have him handle it.

"WHAT IS YOUR MALFUNCTION, NUMBN*TS?"

[Helotes]

Is it just me or does anyone else think it an erie coincidence that just as everyone starts talking about how it looks like Spirit may have found water, Spirit stops talking? The little green men put a stop to any news right away, No?

[Hiwayman]

101100000,1110101010101101,10101000011 = ctrl, alt, delete.

[BenLurkin]

[unixfox]

Maybe it just needs an updated driver. 8-}

[Arkinsaw]

Well, this is good news. This occurred with Pathfinder also so maybe they will be able to reboot. I hope they are able to figure out what it was because having this happen every day or so would be a pain.

[TC Rider]

I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.

[Orangedog]

If the designers didn't build in a reboot routine that could be triggered from Earth, they should be shown the door.

[longtermmemmory]

Remember the jupiter probe which had the antena fail to deploy. Nasa was able to work around that one too.

[antaresequity]

SPIRIT ROVER experienced a runtime error 419
ABORT RETRY FAIL

[michigander]

"WHAT IS YOUR MALFUNCTION, NUMBN*TS?"

[Prince Caspian]

"WHAT IS YOUR MALFUNCTION, NUMBN*TS?"

You grabastic piece of amphibious sh#t!

[Hugin]

This btw demonstrates why the people who say putting humans into space is too expensive and we should use machines are just plain wrong. If a manned expedition has an equipment failure they can fix it. If a robot breaks down that's a lot of wasted money.

[RogueIsland]

This is encouraging. We joke, and it's natural to do so, but I try to remember that real people have invested a lot of hopes, dreams, and sweat in this project, and I really want to see it succeed for them. I have to say I still have a sense of awe when I realize that we've actually managed to project our presence onto entirely different planets. It still amazes me. Any time I get down about our future as a race, I just have to think of this sort of thing and it renews my faith in us as a species.

[Dilbert56]

Software was written in Java - probably took to long to run garbage collection. Maybe they got interplanetary spam or a pop-up.

[Bush Cheney]

If the designers didn't build in a reboot routine that could be triggered from Earth, they should be shown the door.

I think you are underestimating the complexity of this spacecraft. A reboot in which you are considering is not even possible with a spacecraft of this magnitude. You may be able to reset components, or reload software algorithms, but it is not like resetting your home computer.