Spirit Sends First Photo Since Troubles Began

Yahoo ^ | Jan 29 2004 | By Robert Roy Britt

[Dog]

Spirit Sends First Photo Since Troubles Began

By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer, SPACE.com

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NASA (news - web sites)'s troubled rover Spirit has sent a new photograph back from Mars. It is the robot's first significant data transmission since its computer went haywire last week.

The image was taken and sent back Wednesday. It was captured by the rover's front hazard avoidance camera and shows the robotic arm extended to a rock previously named Adirondack. Mission managers did not say whether it was an indicator of Spirit's health.

Spirit's science operations halted just as it crawled to the pointy rock and was about to begin drilling into it. The rover's computer rebooted itself more than 100 times over a two-day period and, at first, sent back beeps but no data. Engineers have since determined that the problem appears to involve too many files overloading the onboard computer memory.

A spectrometer, which would identify minerals in the rock, is still placed on Adirondack, as it had been instructed prior to the computer glitch.

"Engineers are working to restore Spirit to working order so that the rover can resume the scientific exploration of its landing area," a NASA statement accompanying the picture said. No other details have been provided about the rover's condition since a Wednesday morning press briefing.

"Right now we're working to get complete control of the vehicle, and we're still not quite there," Jennifer Trosper, Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said earlier Wednesday. "If we're on the right track, we hope to be back doing some science by early next week. If we're not on the right track, it could take longer than that."

Spirit is in the Gusev Crater on Mars. Its twin, Opportunity, is on the other side of the planet and preparing to roll off its landing pad, possibly as early as Sunday.

The combined mission cost is $820 million and is designed to determine whether Mars was once wetter, possibly with the conditions necessary for life.

[Knitebane]

The rovers run Wind Rivers VxWorks embedded OS.

An article detailing it is here.

[dead]

The RAM is radiation hardened, so is a little more expensive than your average RAM.

No matter how much they charge for Mars-ready RAM, I’m sure the price is a very small fraction of the shipping and handling charges.

[randog]

Yeah, I got that from RockyMtnMan's link. I've got a little more faith in the Rover now that I know that it isn't using Java.

[Revolting cat!]

[RockyMtnMan]

The hardware on Mars isn't using Java but all the intelligence on the ground is using Java ;-).

I didn't see any mention of what software was actually running on the rover, just the hardware, so it still could have a VM on the rover. Java runs on all platforms unlike Windows.

[InABunkerUnderSF]

There's that $820 million figure again. Why do they keep publishing the price tag in every news story? The press hasn't needed to do this before. What are they trying to do soften us up before they lay the price tag for the Cassini mission on us?

[Mr. K]

The Java joke is that it is supposed to be "write once, run anywhere"- in real life it is "Write once, DEBUG everywhere"

.NET will replace Java in 2 years

[RockyMtnMan]

Highly unlikely, too many enterprise apps are using Java now. IBM rules the roost in most large enterprises and I don't see them switching to .NET anytime soon.

The app my company develops runs on many platforms using the same codebase. We did have to do some debugging but compared to a C++ environment it was a piece of cake.

[WIladyconservative]

I just knew it. Spirit's running under Windows.

That's EXACTLY what my 12 year old said when he heard it was a memory problem!!!

[MrConfettiMan]

You mean VxDoesn'tWorks. :)

It's my understanding the problem has to do with the file / memory management code within VxWorks.

Here's another article on the subject: Thinking on Mars: The Brains of NASA's Red Planet Rovers

[Erasmus]

One of these days, Alice, one of these days....

POW!!!! UP TO MARS!

[Revolting cat!]

You forgot: "BANG! ZOOM!"

[r9etb]

I was going to adorn the thread with a picture of a car on blocks, and even did the Google Image Search

I'm stunned.

[Revolting cat!]

I like when you can use the Pete Townshend excuse: "I was only doing research, Your Honor!"

[r9etb]

"I was only doing research, Your Honor!"

C'mon -- would you really have expected that when you searched for "cars on blocks?" Sometimes ya just have to wonder....

[Revolting cat!]

The *****graphers do all kinds of tricks to try to outsmart the Web indexing software, which attempts to to screen them out, and in this case they succeeded. AltaVista and AlltheWeb don't show that one.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

"ACK! ACK!...ACK! ACK! ACK!....DEAN?...EEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHH. QUICK, DESTROY THIS THING!"

[Mr. K]

I can appreciate your point of view, but IBM tried to stick with OS/2 for how long? before it was officially dead

[RockyMtnMan]

Not the same thing. We are talking about enterprise apps not desktop OS's. Microsoft has never owned the high-end enterprise apps that has always been the territory of IBM.

Microsoft was/is so shaken up by Java they first tried to destroy it then they copied it (C#). Java will be around for a long time to come much to Microsoft's dismay.

[Redcloak]

The problem, of course, had to do with the last image it sent back...