Spirit Rover Communications Error

cybrthng writes "Through yesterdays press release and the current Nasa Briefing there is news that they are having communications errors with contacting spirit. Is she lost or is it something akin to the Pathfinder failures that happened? Or did little green people claim an expensive tonka truck toy?"

Mars Defense System

chalk another one up for the mars defense system.

Response from the rover

The latest communication feed has just arrived. Strangely, the only imformation transmitted is:

> Y0ur r0v3r i5 0wn3d!

Re:Mars Defense System

Dont mess with mars.. [timriordan.com]

Re:Mars Defense System

No, this ones down to Beagle.
It was never intended to send the EU any data, it's a Special Ops lander.
It's spent the past month hunting down Spirit Rover and maintinaing radio silence.
Spirit will be on the end of a solar powered swiss army knife by now.

Damn viruses

Maybe the Beagle was infected with the Slammer. That would explain why Beagle never called back, and why the Spirit stopped responding shortly after coming into radio range of the Beagle.

Re:Damn viruses

Maybe the Beagle was infected with the Slammer.

Well, Beagle's failure probably did have something to do with slamming.

Re:Mars Defense System

Nah, it's Colin Pilinger's secret plan. He's intercepted the communications link to the spirit rover, and is driving it at full speed to rescue Beagle 2!

Re:Mars Defense System

Yes, I must admit that I was hoping more than a little that this news of lost contact would be accompanied by a last few photos taken by the Spirit, showing some shadowy figures approaching the rover and posing for the camera.

Re:Mars Defense System

Yes, I must admit that I was hoping more than a little that this news of lost contact would be accompanied by a last few photos taken by the Spirit, showing some shadowy figures approaching the rover and posing for the camera.

here [gargaro.com]

Hoax

It's a hoax. Nasa knows that space exploration will never capture the minds of the people unless it appeals to the least common denominator, just like nascar. They want to introduce car crashes into their missions to revitalize people's interest in the program and to increase funding.

Jawas.

The Jawas came along in their sandcrawler and took the rover. I've seen this before.

Re:Jawas.

The Jawas came along in their sandcrawler and took the rover. I've seen this before.

This is the droid we are looking for!

--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor? [colingregorypalmer.net]

American Weblog in London [colingregorypalmer.net]

Re:Jawas.

When asked to comment on Spirit, a local Jawa said only, "Woo-tee-tee!"

He then tried to sell a reporter an R2 unit with a bad motivator, which promptly fried before the transaction was even completed.

It's obvious but...

All you Martian explorers are belong to us.

Whoever sets up the Martian Automobile Association is going to make a lot of money.

Re:Mars Defense System

Face it. We're not going to find Mars' WMD until we send troops there.

Oh wait...

Re:Mars Defense System

I found the problem! [nickdanger.org]

Re:Mars Defense System

100% lame and tired.

Opportunity

I'm really praying for Opportunity now. We may really need that rover if some good data is to come out of these missions.

Re:You poor deluded fool...

> You've obviously never lost your last 75 cents in the snack machine at 3 AM!

I don't see it as losing 75 cents, per se, but gaining a shitload of change when I kick the fuck out of the machine... and I still don't have the damn chips.

Re:You poor deluded fool...

Did you know that like a dozen people a year get killed when rocking (top heavy) vending machines, which fall and crush them.

The lesson here is clear. Don't kick the machines. That's immature and dangerous.

Instead, return with a baseball bat :)

Re:or a ferret

I had a pet ferret name Ishido, who somehow knew how to climb into a vending machine and release all sorts of goodies. I didnt' teach him this but one day at the laundry mat he snuck up into the machine in the soda tray then after a minute of calling at him about four sodas and a ferret fell out. surprisingly he could repeat the trick.

Re:You poor deluded fool...

...when I kick the fuck out of the machine...

Personally I prefer a good side kick. It leaves you with space to hop out of the way, and if done right will get you several items and some spare change

I found it!

On www.ebay.mars/landers/used.

BSOD

Somewhere in Mars, a little robot has a screen with the Blue Screen of Death.

Re:BSOD

Of course, it's too early to eliminate the use of the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator.

Re:BSOD

Don't be silly. NASA doesn't use technology less than fifteen years old so they know where the bugs are.

It's actually flashing disk-access and power lights, and a large flashing red box on the lander's display with the words "Guru Meditation" within.

Re:Java bot

Yeah, that's funny. It may not be too far from the truth. the particular Java implementation they're using is realtime, so they can tune down or completely turn off garbage collection. Threads running with no interruption from garbage collection have a heap penalty, so they have to be really careful when to put a thread in that state.

IANAJPLR (I am not a JPL researcher) but I'm sure, however, there's a whole bunch of fail-safes that would kick in so that the worst case scenario is a loss of one day's worth of scientific data, if that.

Re:Java bot

The software running onboard the MER rovers is not written in java. Not even a little bit. Sun's posters and propaganda at last year's JavaOne seemed to deliberately give that false impression. There is plenty of Java running on the ground, though, for both planning activities and processing the downlinked data.

Re:BSOD

Spirit runs an Operating System called VXWorks, by Wind River.

Re:BSOD

I'm not sure its running anything now.

Re:BSOD

VXWorks

Obviously it doesn't...

Re:Unbounded priority inversion

Err, did you read the link?

priority inversion can be protected for however the mutex can be coded in two states. Priority Inversion Safe and non priority inversion safe. Unfortunately they forgot to turn the priority inversion protection on. Programming error, plain and simple.

WHen we finally get humans there..

Why do I suspect we are going to find all of the assorted junk Mars has eaten, neatly disassembled and stacked in piles according to the flag painted on the equipment?

Maeryk

Re:Don't worry, it's just taking a rest

OK, so the Spirit rover rolls into a bar. Rover says to the bartender 'excuse me,' bartender ignores him. Rover again says 'excuse me,' bartender ignores him. Martian says to bartender, 'Why don't you answer him?' bartender says 'I know that type, all they ever want is water.' :)

not as bad as it sounds.

A considerable number of things have to work properly for the rover to be in its present state. Mars Global Surveyor received a carrier on UHF but no data, confirming that the UHF antenna, amplifier, and tranmitter are functional. The fact that it transmitted at the correct time (at night) indicates batteries and power systems are at least mostly functional, and that the spacecraft computer/avionics system was able to calculate the time of the MGS pass.

Also, NASA's DSN (Deep Space Network) has been able to send commands asking Spirit to send tones on X-Band, and has received the response tones back. This confirms that at least the low gain antenna, antenna switch, x-band receiver, and x-band tone transmitter are functional.

Perhaps a software fault or a synchronization problem with the radios is preventing valid daa frames from being transmitted. The fact that so much is known to functional argues against a failure that will incapacitate the spacecraft indefinitely. In the coming days, if communications are not restored, the spacecraft will enter safe modes that cause it to try harder to transmit and will reset subsystems. I am optimistic at this point.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

I am assuming that you have insider info? Or are you just playing the part?

He probably gets NASA TV on his TV system. I'm watching it now and they're going over this stuff. There's a press conference ongoing.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

Nah, he just stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

By now they have probably rebooted it (forced it through safe mode to clear any software fault; space vehicles never really go all the way "down"), so if it's still happenning I would say it's either a hardware fault or corruption of essential software or data in (putatively) nonvolatile memory (not unreasonable in high-rad environments).

If it is corruption of secondary memory, and since they can send valid commands, presumably they can attempt to upload new data/code to fix it.

If they haven't forced it through safe mode, then they're not too worried and are more interested in characterizing the problem than getting on with the scientific mission. Which is a good or a bad thing depending on which sort of information is more valuable. I'm sure the guys in the software group have their bias.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

By now they have probably rebooted it (forced it through safe mode to clear any software fault; space vehicles never really go all the way "down"), so if it's still happenning I would say it's either a hardware fault or corruption of essential software or data in (putatively) nonvolatile memory (not unreasonable in high-rad environments).

Not impossible, but relatively unlikely with deep-space grade hardware. It'd require a double fault to create a detectable error, and more than that to create an undetectable one.

If they haven't forced it through safe mode, then they're not too worried and are more interested in characterizing the problem than getting on with the scientific mission. Which is a good or a bad thing depending on which sort of information is more valuable. I'm sure the guys in the software group have their bias.

They've had one day, and much of that was spent thinking the problem was because of thunderstorms/atmospheric vapor near Canberra and dish tracking problems were causing communications errors. It's important to get some idea of the problem before you go shoving things into safe modes because you may make things worse (if it's a power bus fault, for instance).

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

"Perhaps a software fault ...

Umm, no, I'm quite sure it's a hardware problem. ;P

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

I have narrowed it down.

1) It is a hardware problem. OR

2) It is a software problem.

I lean towards (1) as nobody that I work with created the software for this device.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

That tone is still unconfirmed-- they are not positive they have received it (it came in only 2.5 hours ago and processing the data sets takes time.. NASA has not confirmed that they are sure they got a 7.2 tone).

But I agree it is likely the rover is reporting it is faulted, even if it is not a sure thing yet.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

In the coming days, if communications are not restored, the spacecraft will enter safe modes that cause it to try harder to transmit and will reset subsystems.

Hopefully, that would work. However, it will be pretty annoying if all of the images it sends back after that are 16-color 640x480 GIFs with the words "Safe Mode" overlayed in the four corners.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

NASA has experience with uploading new software (including os) to deployed spacecraft to correct defects.

On Tuesday, I talked with some of the project scientists for a TechTV interview that's running next week on Screen Savers. One of the many things I learned from them was that they upload new software, and patches, and all that stuff with surprising frequency and ease.

The thing that really blew my mind was, in order to make their launch date, they just coded enough commands to get the thing there, and sent all the software to drive around and research stuff after the landing while the spacecraft was in transit.

I really hope they solve this current problem, and get the mission back on track. They are SUPER cool people at JPL who are working on this.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

I meant a synchronization problem between the physical transmitter unit and the main avionics system.

When it comes to clocks, it is somewhat complicated. The rover keeps a clock, and usually finds earth by locating the sun in the sky. It has a set of keplerian/rotational elements for both Earth around the Sun and the MGS/Odyssey around Mars, and thus knows when they rise and set in the sky. This tells it when to transmit and where to point the antenna.

Full duplex communications are possible on xband, so transmitting and receiving do not need to be synchronized. Blocks of data are sent with error correction codes-- as they arrive intact, messages are sent telling the rover to delete them. Retransmits can also be requested if the data is particularly interesting and missing (but often aren't, as witnessed by the number of empty portions of images.

UHF is usually just used to offload additional data from the rover during the night to the satellites. The delays are short and the protocols are thus more conventional.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

In the coming days, if communications are not restored, the spacecraft will enter safe modes that cause it to try harder to transmit and will reset subsystems.

They sent the second rover, Opportunity, for just this reason: to hold down the F8 key on the Spirit while it reboots.

(Oblique Windows joke.)

A fatal exception 0E has occurred.....

Please restart your rover. If the problem persists, contact [e-mail].

Re:A fatal exception 0E has occurred.....

Yeah, someone's gonna have to go punch the reset button at the console.... volunteers?

Re:A fatal exception 0E has occurred.....

The horrible thing is that they restarted it, and now it's on a screen that says, "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue."

Ha ha

Silly Americans. Beagle was, in actual fact, a saboteur machine, and it has been lying in wait for your little buggy to attack!

Score one for our defence department. God save the Queen!

Re:Ha ha

Battlebots, the international/interplanetary edition...

Let's hope its just software

But Spirit was only transmitting "pseudo-noise", a random series of zeroes and ones in binary code and not anything the scientists could decipher. - BBC News

It sounds like we still have power and an antenna. Hopefully its just some software error will need a reboot to correct the problem. I think they were late debugging this stuff and actually had to upload the software after the launch. Maybe they missed something.

The only issue I heard was some voltage spikes when the high-gain antenna was rotated. They were not reproduced but perhaps some underlying problem has occurred.

Up to now, NASA has made this look so easy. This is a wake-up call. Putting robots unto another planet is still an epic achievement and so much is left to go wrong even after the landing is over.

Let's hope this is just a red screen of death and a reboot will shake things loose.

Re:Let's hope its just software

But Spirit was only transmitting "pseudo-noise", a random series of zeroes and ones in binary code and not anything the scientists could decipher. - BBC News

The Martians probably just upgraded the codecs.

Re:Let's hope its just software

a random series of zeroes and ones in binary code and not anything the scientists could decipher.

Ah, that would be the NSA encryption kicking in. Actually, there was one decipherable message: "I'm sorry, JPL, I can't do that."

Soil Science is so interesting.

A great article about it over here. [confusionroad.com]

Radio update

The newsflash I heard over the radio at lunch quoted someone (didn't catch a name) as saying that, at present, Spirit wasn't even relaying telemetry data -- so for the time being they've no way to even tell what happened, let alone how to fix it.

I hope that they track it down and can fix it easily; Spirit was one of the coolest things going in recent weeks, and was providing a welcome break from all the election primary coverage.

I also really hope we don't degenerate into a `hah, you laughed at Beagle, now it's your turn` style flamewar. Hell, I'll actually settle for one or the other. :)

Re:Radio update

I was pissed enough that so many people on /. did laugh when Beagle disappeared; let's hope the same doesn't happen in the other direction.

They haven't quite given up on Beagle 2 yet. For the last few days its controllers have not sent any communications to Mars. Assuming that the lander is in one piece, it should now have switched to a beacon mode which will transmit throughout the Martian day.

ESA will begin listening for Beagle 2 again over the weekend, but this is very much a last-ditch attempt.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:Coincidence

> I know, I know, the Martian Air Force strikes again, but while this is pretty solidly bad news, We've got another lander still scheduled to arrive Saturday.

Ahem. Spirit's on Mars. The MAF failed it. Give credit where it's due - this was a Martian Army operation.

The Martian Air Force gets to try and redeem themselves this weekend.

I'd say something about the Martian Marine Corps, but of course, we can't keep our damn probes working long enough to find out if the Martians need a Marine Corps.

Not The End Of The World

From the press release: similar events occurred several times during the Mars Pathfinder mission So a friendly "Don't Panic."

Last Transmission

"Oh Goody! My Illudiom Pew36 Explosive Space Modulator!"
[end carrier]

Check it out...

I found this not too long ago [nasa.gov]... It's a simulated bird's eye view from MER-B or the Opportunity Rover looking at Mars. It's supposed to land at around 9 PM PST on January 24.

I sure hope this does better than some of the others so far.. Otherwise we might already know it's fate.

Conspiracy Theory

Some custodial technicial at a large airplane hangar shaped building in northeastern florida or southern california accidentally pulled the CatV cable from the patch panel.

Nothing to see here, move along

AFAICT, this is not a Big Deal. They recieved acknolegement from the rover, they just haven't heard anything since. It's certainly possible it went haywire, and flipped itself over, and is now just doomed, but it seems unlikely. Sojourner managed to survive comms glitches, and I'm sure this buggy will, too. Hell, it's not like dropped packets are unheard of on the Internet, and we still manage to read slashdot every day.

I suppose if I was ambitious, this would be a good time for a joke about sSFGKJL%% NO CARRIER

The BBC's report

The BBC is reporting it here [bbc.co.uk].

The most annoying thing...

There sits Spirit, silent and still on the frigid Martian surface.

Somewhere deep within its electronics, there's an error that was trapped. The message, which would be displayed if only there was a monitor onboard,
simply reads:

Communication error; press any key to retry

Doh.

Lesson learned: be sure to handle your exceptions properly.

Re:The most annoying thing...

In related news, SETI@Home has deciphered it's first alien message, it read:

"Which one's the any key?"

you joke

But one of our first satellites (I worked for a very small satellite firm) had a debug terminal for informational messages it spat out as it ran. No, we never expected to receive a keypress on this terminal... but we did most of our testing with this terminal because if something went wrong, we'd want to be able to see the error messages.

When we tried to run the satellite without the terminal, the low level hardware CTS/DTR loopback wasn't present and the satellite hung when it tried to send its first character to the console. We caught that only a couple weeks before shipping the thing, too!

certainly the communications software.

given that NASA uses real player [nasa.gov] for their briefings, they're probably just stuck waiting for the "buffering..." message to finish.

Newsconferece replays

NASA TV is replaying the news conference from this morning. They have replayed it twice so far.

Its been reported that a signal was sent to Spirit this morning to try and figure out whether it was in fault mode or not, and preliminary results suggest that Spirit is in fault mode. This is preliminary data and was announced half way through the news conference.

There is as of yet no reliable information as to what the state of Spirit is.

No offence to the original submitter

But I like my writeup better :P

"ghettoboy22 writes "Multiple news [msn.com] services are reporting [bbc.co.uk] the Martian Interplanetary Defence Force (MIDF) has successfully captured an extraterrestial craft codenamed "Spirit" [space.com] on the outskirts of a small village in Lower Gusev province two days ago, coming on the heals of the successful downing of another [beagle2.com] invasion craft last month. Speculation has insued from Spirit's handlers on Earth who are suggesting the craft was hit with the much feared Martian "Cosmic Ray" computer viri, causing it to speak nothing but jibberish. No worries though - our buddies will have their work cut out for them when Spirit's sister-ship "Opportunity" [nasa.gov] makes it's decent from Martian orbit in T minus 58 hours!""

Bush knew about this in advance!

Now he can justify that manned mission to Mars: Someone has to go press Ctrl-Alt-Delete on Spirit to reboot it!

Somewhere deep in the bowels of NASA

Is one really smart pissed of engineer saying I TOLD YOU THIS WAS GONNA HAPPEN.

Re:Somewhere deep in the bowels of NASA

Or maybe there's one really paranoid engineer who complains about everything and, coincidentally, was right this one time.

Maybe Garbled Commands?

"A rainstorm in Australia yesterday interfered with commands being uplinked to Spirit. At that time, the spacecraft sent a short signal indicating it had received the instructions but engineers said the strength of the uplink was much lower than desired and that not all of the commands got through."

Is it at all possible that getting half commands or garbled commands has confused Sprit?

Re:Maybe Garbled Commands?

There's much more detail about this here [theage.com.au].

Apparently, Tidbinbilla is one of only 3 stations tracking Spirit from Earth. If it's out, they have to wait until Spirit is visible from over the horizon at another station before they can communicate.

A call for manned missions

While this is a serious setback it illustrates an important point that many seem to have missed. Its damed _hard_ to operate a complicated piece of equipment you can't deal with in real time or even near real time. The rover is some of the best science we have deployed to another planet and I am sure many will point to this and say that is an indication that we should send more rovers and robots to Mars before we even consider sending people. I disagree with this point, since in many cases a human could avoid problems or work around them in ways that a robot currently cannnot. I don't believe that human life is cheap at all and every effort should be made to keep explorers safe, but believing that there will no cost in human life in our quest to explore the stars is just naive. I would rather our next step to be deploying a manned orbiter around Mars, with the intention of being able to drop far less sophisticated robots and rovers who are controlled by humans orbiting above. This gives a great deal more flexibility and makes incidents on the Red Planet much less likely to cause a mission to be a complete multi-million dollar/euro failure.

Counterpoint

Some things get simpler with humans around, but many also get harder. Remember that manned missions to Mars cost something like 100 times more than unmanned. Measuring how much you get out of it per billion dollars is the interesting measure, not how much you get per mission.

If we can't communicate with Spirit . . .

. . . does this mean we need a Medium?

Mars Crossing Over
with John Edwards

"I see . . . red rocks! Lots and lots of red rocks! Does that sound familiar?"

"Why, why yes!"

"Now, did this Spirit have . . . are they wheels?"

"Oh, oh yes, yes, Spirit does have wheels! Please, ask it if it's OK!"

"It says it's on a flat, red plain covered with red rocks, and that it's found life and water and everything there is peaceful and cool."

"Oh, thank you, thank you Mr. Edwards!"

Stefan

I knew it was coming

Mars ISP finally cut him off the network. That rover was transmitting a lot of data.

Casey^h^h^h^h^hSpirit at the Bat

Oh, somewhere in that barren land the water's running fast.
The cells are growing somewhere, 'til something eats the last.
And somewhere plans are thriving, with martians turning violent.

But there is no joy in JPL --
The Spirit has gone silent.

(for now).

BOT WARS

See.. Beagle didnt fail.. it transformed. Out came the titanium pick on the air cylinder, and the saw blades on the grapple arms.

And it sat.. covered in martian dust.. WAITING for Spirit to leave its safety nest in the landing pod..

the only thing missing is an announcer trying to sound worked up over the idea of two robots tearing each other to pieces!

Maeryk

Beagle

First let me say I hope this problem is fixed. Next let me say even if it is not, Spirit has done some wonderful things already and that sure beats going boom before it ever lands like so many before it.

Now I'm going to say this: would all the people that bragged about NASA/JPL doing so much better than the Beagle team be quiet?

Guess what. Landing a complex machine on another planet is not easy. It's simply amazing humans can even do this at all. When something goes wrong, we can't exactly reach out and tap the little thing a few times to see if it fixes it.

The teams behind both Spirit and Beagle did excellent work against the insane list of Things That Can Go Wrong in getting something from here to there. Both teams did their best, and both teams make me feel very proud of the human race.

Re:Beagle

Now I'm going to say this: would all the people that bragged about NASA/JPL doing so much better than the Beagle team be quiet?

I have not been one of those people, but NASA/JPL still got the hardest part right - they successfully landed and operated the rover for a few days (and got good data back), rather than losing it entirely and never knowing what happened to it.

Touchdown is the most dangerous, hardest part of the operation to get right. Beagle didn't do that (we assume), Spirit did. Beagle got to the vicinity of the planet - but we've been successful many times in hurling an object at Mars and getting it in the neighborhood.

Now they know

now they know what happens when you try to grind a strange "rock" shaped like a pyramid.

Richard Hoagland is gonna be soooooo all over this. /tinfoil

Keyboard error

Press F1 to continue...

From the webcast

They were just saying there are many sequences of events that could cause this. If it sensed the battery was overly discharged it will stop sending data & wait for a recharge. It could be as simple as this.

Last transmission..

I@$hri89&Q24gtr24gr

Which translated to..

"We 0wn3d j00r b0x f00lz! S3nd L1nux b0xez N ch1cks n3xt t1me!"

It's a conspiracy, I say! A c-o-n-... spiracy!

NASA knows what's up, they just don't want US to know! They now have live video feeds from Spirit showing Mohammed living it up with his virgins (well, they were virgins a few thousand years ago). But since Bush the Zionist is in control of every step NASA takes, he doesn't want anyone to know that the Muslims are right! The great evil empire is covering up the truth! Mars is heaven, Venus is hell, and he's doomed us all to Venus!

He is intentionally making us all evil to work in his sulfur mines that will be on Venus when we arrive in Hell! Won't SOMEONE PLEASE think of the children!

(Don't mod me down for trolling, it's a joke. Don't like it? Ignore it, probably means you have good taste in humor.)

They forgot about Marvin

and they have made him VERY angry indeed.

ping went out and the pong came back

According to mission manager Jennifer Trosper at the end of their 1810 UTC (22 Jan 2004) news conference:

"

If the spacecraft believes it's in a fault mode, its command rate should be 7.8 bits per second. We sent a beep today, this morning, about the time that we came down here to talk to you. We sent a command that says if you get this send us a beep. And I'm told from Richard that Jennifer came down here to tell us that they think they got it! That would tell us that the spacecraft thinks it's in the fault side of the tree some how for some reason. That would mean that we have got positive power, some elements of the software is working, once again the Xband system is working ... the SSPA, the multispace transponder, all that stuff is working so that would be more information .. good news. We need to confirm that. Data off the DSN sometimes needs double checking. We'll let you know if that's for sure."

Stay tuned ...

NEWSFLASH!

Reuters - Bitter unsuccesful UK rival, 'Beagle 2', accused of slamming into 'Spirit' out of jealous rage.

Spirit status updates

Spirit status updates are here: http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly .html [spaceflightnow.com]

new hires at nasa

In a related story, NASA has announced the addition of Miss Cleo to the staff as lead communications officer.

The NASA CEO issued a statement in which he said the repetitive and excited tone of a late night infomercial he watched left him utterly convinced that Miss Cleo could indeed communicate with the the Spirit and all problems should be fixed by Monday.
He also touted the hire as a money saving measure because 'most communications with the Spirit tend to last about 30 seconds, but with Miss Cleo the first five minutes is only $1.95!'

The last theory I heard...

was there there was a malfunction between the table saw blade and the Speak & Spell.

What does the Spirit OS look like?

Or, more clearly, what do the operating routines look like? Does anyone have a flowchart that would show the data flow? What sort of error checking is done on incoming data? What sort of encryption is done on incoming/outgoing data? (Cartoon bubble: I picture a script kiddie with a powerful transmitter sending SQL injection to Spirit...)

What does the system do if it determines it has had an unexpected result/crash? How is such a system designed and tested?

I've never thought about it before - but a system like this must have redundant levels of i/o security, internal error checking, exception trapping, and some sort of self-repair, all built within multiply redundant systems.

Would any details of the embedded system architecture / program structure be available to the public?

Re:What does the Spirit OS look like?

The OS on the Spirit lander was created by Wind River - details are here [windriver.com]. As with any OS designed for deep-space uses there are multiple redundancies on virtually every aspect of the system.

Life

Maybe they've already discovered signs of life and are using the communications story as a cover up while they figure out how to best handle the news.

wbs.

Mars Rover Interface on Earth

I've seen the interface they use to control the rover. It's text based.

You are standing in an open field west of a red rock, with a crusty appearance.
There is a small mailbox here.

>open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet.

>read leaflet
(taken)
"WELCOME TO MARS!

Re:hold on, it's just the java garbage collector!

Nothing runs Windows in this respect. The Rover runs custom code for the Rad 6000 chip they use in the vxworks RTOS, and the mission control systems use Java to run a live version of Meastro.
Also, the chip they use, a radiation hardened 6000 CPU comes from the days before Java was even thought of. Read up on the facts first.

INFORMATION ON THE PATHFINDER/SOJOURNER FAULT:

I thought it would be interesting to dig up and re-read the accounts from the last time there was a "serious" software glitch on the ground on Mars:

• Part 1 [microsoft.com]
  
• Part 2 (more detail) [microsoft.com]

There's a lot of rumor and inconclusive news about Spirit floating around right now, so this is entirely subjective, but I'm getting the feeling this, too, is a software fault of some kind. Put most simply, you could interpret what we're reading right now as "we received the ACK tone for our instructions but didn't get the data back we expected."

These kinds of problems are not unprecedented, and furthermore I'm under the impression there are options for dealing with even serious OS-level trouble that would shock and awe the average general purpose computer user.

If only it was running Windows XP

Then it would REBOOT after a critical error!

Don't say that

From an article [space.com] on the same site:

Jennifer Trosper, Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover project ... "The rover remains in excellent shape for trundling over to the nearby crater," Trosper said. "The spacecraft continues to amaze me. There's nothing to make me think that this vehicle isn't going to last a long time," she concluded.

Oops.

Wouldn't It Be Nice....

...to have an engineer on scene to fix it.

Robots are great until they break.

Martian Conservatives

UNIVERSAL NEWS SYNDICATE - MARS The Martain Government announced today that it has suspended any direct communication between the rover and earth until it has ascertained if any code on the rover constitutes a potential violation of SCO's IP suit. A spokesbeing for the ruling faction said off the record that the suit 'really has them turning green.' To which Darl McBride replied 'If it's green I want it!'

Cutting rocks

Last I'd heard, Spirit was going to sample a rock by grinding away part of the rock's surface, then imaging the patch.

So, I think what we'll find when we finally get there is a twisted mass of acid-etched metal, and burned into the ground next to it:

NO KILL I

Ensign Naraht's mother is gonna be PISSED.

Contact Re-Established!

Good news - The Spirit rover has contacted JPL!

Bad News - It has detected a new device and is asking for the Windows Install CD to be inserted to continue.

It has to be done, sorry.

In 2004, Mars exploration was happening.

Nasa Engineer 1: What happen?
Nasa Engineer 2: Somebody set up us the pseudo-noise.
NE2: We get signal.
NE1: What you say?
NE2: Main screen turn on.
NE1: It's you!!!
Mars: How are you gentlemen?
Mars: All your rover are belong to us.
NE1: What you say??
Mars: You are on the way to dissolution.
Mars: You have no chance to incresase funding, make your time.
Mars: Ha ha ha!!!
Bush: Move manned mission.
NE1: You sure about this?
Bush: For great re-election,
Bush: Take off every manned mission.

Update 4:00PM EST

As reported on spaceflightnow.com [spaceflightnow.com],

As project officials reported at the end of today's news conference, Mission Control received a radio signal from Spirit just before 12 noon EST. This simple message from the rover confirms it had received a transmission from Earth, and encourages engineers since it proves that Spirit is still alive and functioning.

So we'll see, this does confirm that at least they can ping it.

remember pathfinder in 97?

• But a few days into the mission, not long after Pathfinder started gathering meteorological data, the spacecraft began experiencing total system resets, each resulting in losses of data.

Pathfinder [nasa.gov] in it's 1997 landing (04JUL1997) suffered a series of unexplained system failures [kohala.com]. David Wilner CTO of WindRiver Systems [windriver.com], the creators of WxWorks the realtime embedded system kernel talked to IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium at a later date explaining how they solved software bugs in the system.

• leaving the "debugging" facilities in the system saved the day

this article [kohala.com] explains how they solved the problem - by including the debug code with the os. I remember reading about this on /. some time ago. A detailed account can be read here [microsoft.com] by Glenn Reeves (JPL Mars Flight SE).

Windriver systems is supplying [windriver.com] the OS for the current mission. Lets see how long it takes them to work this one out :)

links:
www.kohala.com/start/papers.others/pathfinder.html [kohala.com]
research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Mars_Pathfinder/Author itative_Account.html [microsoft.com]

Just curious . . . .

Why are the Martians assumed to be green when they live on a red planet?

Re:It escaped!!

We all know whats going on, the Martians hot wired it and are joy riding around. The green bastards also painted flames on the side and put a tacky neon license plate mount on the front..