NASA LOOKS FOR ANSWERS AS MARS ROVER STAYS MUTE

The Indianapolis Star

[hookman]

By Andrew Bridges Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif---- NASA's Spirit rover has stopped transmitting data from Mars in an omnious turn that baffled engineers and sent them scrambling desperatley Thursday to figure out what brought the mission to a potentially calamitous halt. NASA received its las significant data from the unmanned Spirit early Wednesday, its 19th day on the surface. Since then, it has sent either random, meaningless radio noise or simple beeps acknowledging it has received commands from Earth. "We now know we have had a very serious anomaly on the vehicle," project manager Pete Theisinger said at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Engineers struggled to diagnose what was wrong. Possible causes: a corruption of its software or computer memory. If the software is awry, NASA can beam patches to the rover. But if the problem lies with the hardware, the situation would be far more grave. Spirit is one-half of an $820 million mission. Its twin, Opportunity, is expected to land on Mars late Saturday.

[hookman]

So my question to everyone is what do you really think is going on? Will Oportunity bring new answers "late Saturday", and the days to come?

[jmcclain19]

This is old news. They were back in communication with this today.

[narby]

Toasted microprocessor. Or memory.

Modern microprocessors aren't nearly as robust as the old stuff from the 60's/70's. The old stuff might have been terribly primative, and orders of magnitude less powerful. But they were robust.

This thing lives in a very hostile environment, remember. I think Mars doesn't have a good magnetic field, so it's probably bombarded by radiation.

And the temperature swings are pretty heavy. D@mn cold.

The spacecraft I worked on in the early 80's (AMPTE - you never heard of it) had two command processors. One went schitzo after only a week or two. We lived on the backup command processor for several years, till it did the same thing.

Wanna bet these guys don't even have a backup?

[hookman]

still what do you think is going on with all of this?

What about Opportunity, will there be a heroic rescue?

[hookman]

radiation huh?

whats the uranium like up there?

[jmcclain19]

Opportunity is landing on the other side of the planet from Spirit. Considering those rovers can only travel so many yards each day, that's impossible.

It could be two fold. If it's a software problem, then then they'll fix it, patch it and reboot it, problem somewhat solved.

If it's hardware issue, well, then you have another $400 million useless mars rock out there.

[RightWhale]

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Did NASA acquire JPL? Thought it belonged to CIT.

[mgstarr]

Thought you might like the trip down memory lane:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/space/ampte.html

[N. Theknow]

...-..-../.-..-....-....--.../....-.---.----...-.
Translation: NASA to Rover: "What did we say that upset you?

---.---...-/.-.-.-.----....---..-.-.-.-..---...-.-..-/
Translation: Rover to NASA: "Well, if you don't know I'm not going to tell you."

[mikegi]

I took a wild assed guess at potential causes in a different thread: Mars Probe has Software Glitch. If the software is rebooting from two or more different causes then it's most likely flaky hardware.

[birg]

An overall hardware system status report should be available
from a core unit that acts as the last guy to fall...
Any design that does not incorporate such a feature is wishful thinking and keeping one's hands crossed 'cos
random external stresses and environmental pressures will always be encountered by such a rover. Operating in the "dark" without an axis by axis sub-component status check is blind man's buff.....

[TomGuy]

[Snickering]

"Flip the switch off."

"We'll turn it back on tomorrow, then turn it off again. hehehe. Earthlings, they think they are soooo smart."

[KellyAdmirer]

Wanna bet these guys don't even have a backup?

How can you design a $400 million spacecraft that doesn't have backups of something so basic? I'm not being sarcastic, these NASA guys aren't complete morons - I hope.

Also, I would assume they would only design the thing within known tolerance limits? Are you saying that there are unknown temperature/radiation situations there, or simply that the mission planners were winging it?

This isn't a consumer computer hard drive that can be expected to fail on a percentage basis, but part of an $800 million project. If the processor simply got "toasted" from the radiation in the most benign of Martian situations, that doesn't comfort me much about the competence of anyone at NASA.

[shadowman99]

start spirit transmission

01001000011001010111100100100000010011100100000101010011010000010010000001100111011101010111100101110011001000010010000001000011011000010110111000100111011101000010000001110100011000010110110001101011001000010010000001001001001000000110110101100001011001000110010100100000011100110110111101101101011001010010000001100011011011110110111101101100001000000110111001100101011101110010000001100110011100100110100101100101011011100110010001110011001000010010000100100001001000000101100101101111011101010010000001101110011001010110010101100100001000000111010001101111001000000110001101101111011011010110010100100000011100110110010101100101001000000111010001101000011010010111001100100000011010000110100101100100011001000110010101101110001000000110001101101001011101000111100100100001001000000100100101110100001001110111001100100000011100100110100101100111011010000111010000100000011101010110111001100100011001010111001000100000011101000110100001100101001000000010001001100110011000010110001101100101001000100010000001110100011010000110000101110100001000000111100101101111011101010010000001101011011001010110010101110000001000000111001101100001011110010110100101101110011001110010000001101001011100110110111000100111011101000010000001100001

unexpected termination of signal

[lilylangtree]

The question is: Is NASA sure the Rover is still on Mars? Or was it ever on Mars? Who would know? Only The Shadow knows. Hahahahahaha!