NASA Worried: Spirit Reboots Rover Computer, Twice
Written by Ian O'Neill
A panorama by Sprit, taken last month (NASA)
Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is acting a little strange. Over the Easter weekend, it would appear that the tenacious little Mars explorer rebooted its computer not once, but at least two times. Mission scientists were alerted to the problem as some of the communication sessions from Spirit-to-Earth were irregular, prompting mission control to investigate the problem…
"While we don't have an explanation yet, we do know that Spirit's batteries are charged, the solar arrays are producing energy and temperatures are well within allowable ranges. We have time to respond carefully and investigate this thoroughly," said John Callas project manager for Spirit at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The rover is in a stable operations state called automode and taking care of itself. It could stay in this stable mode for some time if necessary while we diagnose the problem."
Although Spirit successfully communicated with Earth on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, some of the communication sessions were irregular, suggesting that the rover's computer was resetting during the use of the high-gain dish antenna. The twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have several modes of communication open to them, including a pointable high-gain antenna, non-pointable low-gain antenna and a separate UHF transceiver that uses the Mars satellites as relays.
It seems possible that the issue could be software-based, as new software was uploaded only last month. However, this is a routine upload and Opportunity received identical commands and has not suffered from anomalous reboots. Playing it safe, mission operators are not using the high-gain antenna and have opted for using the slower, low-gain antenna while the investigation into the fault is ongoing. Unfortunately, the thought on everyone's mind is that the rover may be suffering from age-related problems; after all, the MER mission was originally slated for three months, not five years.
Although there is concern for Spirit, it is hoped that the weekend's reboot isn't a sign of bigger problems. The rover may have had a rough mission (one of its wheels stopped moving three years ago, and it has since been dragged everywhere it has trundled), but the science it is producing has been astounding. Hopefully Spirit will fight through this latest glitch and continue to do battle in the Martian regolith for a while yet…
Source: NASA
Filed under: Mars
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April 14th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Keep on chugging Spirit Im pulling for ya.
April 14th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Go Spirit! Just like at pep rallys!
April 14th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I wonder if the public is even going to remember what these things are when they finally pack it in…
I can imagine it – the news will announce that spirit or opportunity is dead, and people won't know what the hell they are talking about, they've been going so long!
April 14th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
The teams who built the rovers should be put in charge of building everything NASA uses.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:55 am
You would think that the rovers would have been designed with the ability to write an eventlog to onboard media (to be uploaded to NASA when required). As a sysadmin, experience shows that event logging is critical in troubleshooting problems that would otherwise be left to guesswork. NASA should know if the rover reboots, and what conditions were present when the reboot occurred.
April 15th, 2009 at 8:33 am
I hope Spirit will pull through for us. It has "done" so many of "us" a great deal of "work".