[sam_paine]

Shortly before noon, controllers were surprised to receive a relay of data from Spirit via the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Spirit sent 73 megabits at a rate of 128 kilobits per second. The transmission included power subsystem engineering data, no science data, and several frames of "fill data." Fill data are sets of intentionally random numbers that do not provide information.

Why don't they put the raw data on the web along with their decode tools like they did with the Telascience demos? It'd be nice if I could hack around on the received raw telemetry...not that I'd figure out anything before they did, but with all the hackers in the world working on it, something interesting might be discovered. It's not like there'd be some danger of a hacker transmitting somthing back to Spirit or anything.

[Steve Van Doorn]

Personally I believe some component(s) froze and don’t want the public to find out first.

[RightWhale]

You are correct. Better to have 10 pros and 200,000 amateurs looking at fresh data than just 10 pros. A lot of database expertise sits unused outside work hours. There is the case that a lot of space data is proprietary for a year due to contracts with labs and individual PhDs.