Spirit remains in 'critical' condition (Newest update)3:55 EST

Spaceflightnow.com ^ | 1/23/2004 | William Harwood

[Keith]

Sounds like this may be a long haul with a craft needing a constant "work around." Perhaps some of our Freeper techies can give us some insight as to how bad this sounds.

[Dog]

What do you think?

[CasearianDaoist]

Isn't that spectrometer made by an ESA contractor?

[So Cal Rocket]

Michael Malin, principal investigator of a high-resolution camera aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, unveiled a dramatic photograph showing Spirit, it's parachute and its heat shield resting on the surface of Mars. The remarkable photograph even shows several of Spirit's bounce marks in the martian soil.

[Prime Choice]

Sounds like this may be a long haul with a craft needing a constant "work around." Perhaps some of our Freeper techies can give us some insight as to how bad this sounds.

It's bad, but not as bad as it sounded in the first place. Lots of fine techies are working the problem with the terran copy of Spirit to try to duplicate the glitch and then provide workarounds. (This is true of all long-range spacecraft sent by NASA. Even Galileo had a terran-bound duplicate for such purposes.)

The first step is replaying all commands sent prior to the malfunction. Then comes the process of ruling out causes one-by-one. Then comes ruling out causes-in-combination. It's a painstaking process to say the least.

"Safe mode" probably sounds like a really bad thing to most folks, but it's really not. Those who remember the Galileo mission will recall that the craft went into safe mode several times during the course of its work (and even had a total failure of its high gain antenna), yet the mission was still a success.

I still hold great hope for Spirit. And I'll still be holding my breath when Opportunity goes into the final stages for landing tomorrow night.

[MineralMan]

[Prime Choice]

You know what's really remarkable about that photograph you posted? It's that it took us over 10 years to pinpoint where Viking had landed on Mars. Now we've got it down to a matter of days. Absolutely amazing.

[AppyPappy]

It depends on whether they can flash the software. They should have put a "safe mode" on the computer. Basically, you just run a terminal waiting for input. Who knows if they did that?

[blowfish]

Any computer that's rebooting itself 30 times a day is a very sick computer. Maybe it will heal itself somehow, but it sounds like hardware problems are contributing.

[RightWhale]

Sounds like they have to debug code they have already debugged a zillion times, and they have to do it soon because this device will go off-line in a couple of months anyway. If somebody does find the bug and they can reload, there ought to be some kind of reward. Maybe a new pocket protector w/ a set of 8 colors of ballpoint pens.

[Keith]

so, perhaps we are looking at a hard drive problem?

[bray]

Will this be a setback on Halibertens planned oil pipeline to Mars???

Pray for W and The Truth

[commish]

a very simplistic version of what Spirit is doing is the same thing your home computer doea when Windows finally craps out. Spirit is basically doing the same thing. Rebooting, finding a fault and rebooting again.

What the NASA engineers are doing now is basic troubleshooting and debugging. Much of the time finding the problem is a lot longer than fixing it. Especially when the equipment is only telling you limited information about its condition.

Judging from what the engineers have said, this is not a software problem but a hardware failure of some kind. The "Workaround" is not as bad as they make it sound. They will isolate the malfunctioning piece of equipment and then send programming to Spirit telling it to either disconnect the broken equipment from the system or to ignore the fault signal and not communicate with that piece.

Once Spirit is reprogrammed it will be an automatic "workaround" and will not effect the speed or operation of other pieces of equipment.

where the "degradation" comes in is that the broken piece is gone forever. if it is the Mass-spectrometer -- no tests can be done with that piece of equipment, etc.

That is what NASA is worried about, depending on what failed, Spirit may come back 99% functional or 9% functional. They won't know until they know what broke, and what that effects.

No matter what though, Spirit will be operational again, the question is "How operational"

[birg]

The component status module must be designed to operate independent of external damage/ingress as much as possible. This must be a sort of black box that has a very high fail-safe
design (relative to the main processor, drive units, motion system, chem lab apparatus etc).. thus it must have a polling routine (with multiple redundant comms) that should establish the working status of critical parts. If component status check routine processing and communications go out of wack... the mission is over because you cannot proceed if you are blind to feedback regarding Spirits damage conditions. If a rock were to be blown into the rover.....

[blowfish]

>so, perhaps we are looking at a hard drive problem?
Who knows? Most operating systems are vulnerable to faulty hardware: memory, harddrives, IO hardware etc etc. When a computer is repeatedly crashing with this frequency I would suspect some bad hardware.

[Capt. Tom]

Its a software problem. Can't connect directly to the source. Probably have the wrong address. Happens to earth bound Freepers all the time.-Tom

[Monitor]

It could be a software problem, too.

I worked on embedded systems for many years, though not for NASA. And one thing we always included was a watchdog timer.

Essentially, the watchdog timer is hardware that resets the computer every X seconds, or minutes, or hours (depending on the design), and if the software that's running on the computer doesn't occasionally reset the watchdog timer (because, perhaps it's caught in an infinite loop) then the watchdog timer will reset the computer. If everything is working perfectly, the software always resets the watchdog timer before the watchdog timer can reset the computer.

Considering the article specifically mentions times of 15 minutes and an hour, I suspect it's the watchdog timer that's resetting the computer.

Added to this all is that Spirit is running a multi-tasking, multi-threaded, realtime operating system. As such, the problem could be as simple as a thread having too high a priority (higher than the thread for resetting the watchdog timer), which is grabbing almost all the CPU cycles, thus slowing down communications and pre-empting the watchdog reset thread.

[Joe Hadenuf]

I still hold great hope for Spirit. And I'll still be holding my breath when Opportunity goes into the final stages for landing tomorrow night.

I too hold out hope.

Given the politics of today, I grow tired of hearing and seeing power hunger politicians that care only about reelection and private agenda's. This is real, put together by some of America's best, brightest, best educated people that are on a historical exploration of another world.

On a side note, I can never quite understand American's that mock great American explorations by posting endless, humorless quips and juvenile cartoon pictures and images. I guess I just don't see the humor watching a major project, that is now having considerable difficulty, that so many worked so hard for, be the brunt of jokes. I guess I feel the focus of jokes and mocking should be directed at those in DC. Except for anger from the people, they deserve little else. End of rant.

[expatpat]

Those Martians are pi55ed off at our dumping debris on their planet. The Brit/Euro Beagle was also silenced.

[beckett]

Are you sure about the duplicate stuff? The reason I ask is because a NOVA special followed these engineers around at JPL and the group leader made the point during an impact test of one of the components that this project was unique in that they only had live components, no backups. As I understand it, the backup is the duplicate project, Opportunity, due to land tomorrow morning.