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Space Science

Mars Rover Spirit Back Online 386

Posted by timothy from the expensive-vacation dept.
Skyshadow writes "Just in time for the arrival of its twin, the Spirit Mars Rover is back in working order. Programmers at the JPL have traced the problem to the rover's flash RAM, which it uses to maintain its filesystems. They are using a ramdisk in the rover's RAM to bypass the bad flash memory, and are working on a workaround for the bad flash. Good news, but the rover is still potentially weeks away from full operational status."
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Mars Rover Spirit Back Online More

Mars Rover Spirit Back Online

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  • They found the problem (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:36PM (#8078331)
    They signed up for Mars Online with 3000 free hours. What they didn't realize was that the free 3000 hours only applied to the first month of service. Once they paid their MOL bill, they got hooked back up. All the probes friends on Mars use MOL!

  • Weeks away? (Score:5, Funny)

    by adrianbaugh ( 696007 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:36PM (#8078333) Homepage Journal
    They should boot faster, using linux. Then they'd only be ten seconds away :-)

  • You mite listen to Jimmy, But you can't hear Jimmy (Score:5, Funny)

    by niko9 ( 315647 ) * on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:36PM (#8078338)
    /riff/Move over Rover, let the ramdisk take over!/riff/

    Wonder wehre they got they flash ram [newegg.com] from?

    --

  • Warranty (Score:5, Funny)

    by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) <mark.seventhcycle@net> on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:38PM (#8078351) Homepage
    They are using a ramdisk in the rover's RAM to bypass the bad flash memory, and are working on a workaround for the bad flash.

    I think they should return the bad flash part to where they got it and exchange it for a new part... although getting the memory back to the store by the 30 day warranty might be a little difficult.

    I hope they bought the extended warranty.

    • Re:Warranty (Score:5, Funny)

      by Albinoman ( 584294 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:42PM (#8078378)
      The real question is: Can they get their flash RAM supplier to pay for shipping?
    • Now Nasa has just to wait for Tigerdirect.com to send a replacement, or get store credit..

    • Re:Warranty (Score:5, Insightful)

      by questamor ( 653018 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:16PM (#8078587)
      Curiously, is there any difference with flashram on Spirit, and the stuff we have here? I didn't know about any radiation hardened flash ram... or even if there's any difference between the physical chips themselves in CF, SD, MemorySticks etc.

      The nasa report mentioned the problem seems to be revolving around the software that accesses the flashram. It could be filesystem corruption, or a physical problem with the flash ram itself, or even a broken interface to the flash ram. It's about the equivalent of having a machine a thousand miles away and just seeing that a certain drive won't mount, at the moment. Finding out whether there's a problem with the SCSI card it's connected to, or the drive itself, or a filesystem corruption, or a head crash... that comes in the next few weeks
  • it was their AOL bill that wasn't paid? hmmmm...

  • heh... /. was right! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Smitty825 ( 114634 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:39PM (#8078355) Homepage Journal
    During all of the "Spirit is broken" columns, I kept reading /. comments saying that it was likely a memory error due to the non-consistent errors...I guess a million monkeys with a typewriter can be correct :-)

  • The epitome of remote administration (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:39PM (#8078359) Homepage
    Engineers guessed that Spirit's troubles were in its Flash memory and set about sending the rover a complex series of instructions to see if they could get it to bypass the corrupted memory. Theisinger said engineers sent Spirit a command just before its daily "waking up," telling it to shut down and restart in what is known as "cripple mode," using RAM instead of Flash for its start-up instructions.

    Some people may take this sort of thing for granted, but I for one find it remarkable that we can essentially reboot and perhaps even fix a system that is on a whole other planet.

    Just wait until we have Interplanetary, Interstellar, Intergalactic Remote Desktop. I'm only half-joking.

    • Re:The epitome of remote administration (Score:5, Funny)

      by Daychilde ( 744181 ) <postmaster@daychilde.com> on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:44PM (#8078398) Homepage
      It's all good until tech support says, "So... Do you have a boot disk?" :-)

      • Re:The epitome of remote administration (Score:5, Interesting)

        by blincoln ( 592401 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:26PM (#8078646) Homepage Journal
        It's all good until tech support says, "So... Do you have a boot disk?" :-)

        You joke, but newer servers can do this remotely too.

        We have a bunch of Compaq servers at work, and one of the really cool features of the remote administration software is that you can send a virtual floppy image to the machine from anywhere in the world that can open a web browser connection to the server's remote administration board.

        A few months ago one of our servers in Denver died, and I had to boot it up in Windows 2000's command prompt only safe mode... but the local admin password had never been written down. I was able to make virtual floppy images of a tool that resets the local admin password, send them over the wire, and boot off of them from the remote administration system.

        Okay, it's not fixing a super-expensive robot on another planet, but I thought it was pretty cool.
        • Of course I joke... heh. Mostly because of my past jobs working tech support, and the guy sitting next to me one time who tried to get a customer to type "a colon space setup dot exe" for about 5 minutes until I was off my call, heard what he was doing, and slapped him silly.

          Well, okay, I didn't slap him, but I wanted to. Badly. :-)

          But on your response -- that works. I mean, if you're doing something that you could just about do on another planet, it should count. Maybe not so glorious, but still. :-)
        • Oh god... I really, really hope you have a superb firewall & username & password blocking that machine off from the world. I did just read you right, you didn't have the admin password, so you you used a tool over the remote administration to hack past it?

          Mmmm... hackalicious. :-)

          (I've actually used a similar remote kvm system with lights out boards but until you write it down it just doesn't sound that risky!)
    • it reminds me of when I was trying to get the automount dameon working on a linux machine down in california (I was in oregon) and inadvertantly caused the machine to kernel panic.

      Ended up having to call someone who worked at the machine room to track down the crashed system and restart it :(.
    • ...and it's amazing NASA could press it at the right time from 124 million miles away (1.3 AU). Although I wonder how many times NASA did have to press it before they got the timing right -- we only know about the success :-)

    • You think that's neat (Score:5, Informative)

      by chazR ( 41002 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:18PM (#8078604) Homepage
      Here's [flownet.com] a rant by a JPL guy about appropriate technologies for software on deep space probes. He recounts one story of a failed probe "100 million dollars, and 100 million miles away".

      They fixed it. The fact there was a lisp REPL running on the spacecraft helped.

      That's cool:

      (unwind-protect
      (progn (do-science)(talk-to-earth))
      (wait-in-repl-for-earth))

      • Re:You think that's neat (Score:4, Interesting)

        by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @10:06PM (#8078849)
        This is a bit OT, but I need to rant:

        A quote from his site: "It is incredibly frustrating watching all this happen... I can't even say the word Lisp without cementing my reputation as a crazy lunatic who thinks Lisp is the Answer to Everything"

        I feel his pain. I was introduced to Lisp not too long ago, and within a short time, a Lisp-derived language (Dylan) became my favorite. I also found that many of the features I loved from Python were very Lisp-y in nature. Now, I see Java and C# either neglecting all the knowledge garnered from the Lisp-family of languages, or reinventing it --- badly. The features in C# 2.0 have either been in Lisp for decades (lambdas, closures) or are not necessary in Lisp (iterators, enumerators --- which, btw, are theoretically not necessary in C# 2.0 either because of lambdas and closures!) This new "Xen" (or X#) language Microsoft Research is pushing takes a great idea (extending the language to fit the problem domain) that has been a part of Lisp for decades, and chops it off at the knees. Instead of having proper macros, so you can extend the language to fit *your* problem domain, they hack support for a single problem domain (back-end business programming) into the language itself!

        That said, the Lisp community is to blame as well. Part of the reason people stop listening the moment somebody says Lisp is that the Lisp community is *so* rabid and *so* unyielding. Especially some high-profile members who are highly respected within the community despite the fact that they are completely obnoxious and lack any human sense of manners.

    • We learn from our mistakes... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Chordonblue ( 585047 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:53PM (#8078773) Journal
      So... I wonder if they'll consider validating MRAM more quickly if Flash is found to be more error prone.

      You know how NASA works. The Space Shuttle running on 486's and whatnot. I understand the science behind that reasoning, as sad as a 66 MHz processor seems to us geeks nowadays, but I wonder if MRAM will prove more flexible and stable for future space missions.

    • Remote nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )

      Just wait until we have Interplanetary, Interstellar, Intergalactic Remote Desktop. I'm only half-joking.

      No you're not. All these Mars glitches are exactly why real space exploration entails sending an actual carbon-based unit, not a glorified laptop.

      Consider that an interstellar probe will take years to receive updated instructions. By which time, any fix will probably be irrelevent. Plus if they're more than 30 light-years away (practically next door by galactic standards) they guy who sent out the i

  • So basically... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:40PM (#8078361) Homepage
    If I understand this properly, they've got a damaged filesystem on the flash RAM. Not really a big problem, you just have to send someone over to the console to boot it up in single-user mode and run fsck. ... oh yeah, sending someone over to the console is a little bit difficult here. :)

  • Where is the redundancy? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MWChapel ( 609639 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:41PM (#8078369)
    Shouldn't they have like 5 Flash RAM's? Really,they shouldn't have one of anything. In my computer if my BIOS fries, I pop open the box and replace it. If it fries on mars, obviously I kiss my megamillion dollar project goodbye, all for a $5 Flash ROM.

    • Re:Where is the redundancy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:01PM (#8078499) Homepage
      It's not just a $5 flash ROM. If they wanted control redundancy, they would need extra flash RAM, RAM, ROM, CPU, motherboard, arbitration hardware, and arbitration software.

      Also keep in mind that this isn't a $5 flash ROM chip. When you consider the hostile environment, the testing, the power, and the fuel required to get everything to Mars, that flash ROM probably cost at least fifty thousand dollars.
    • Heck even some current motherboards have dual BIOS in case of failure. Your right, they should have at least double, but really should have triple redundant systems.
    • Shouldn't they have like 5 Flash RAM's? My guess is that they have at least two with some kind of arbitration circuitry.

      I don't know anything about the architecture of the computers on the Rover(s), but I suspect when the term "Flash RAM" is used, they are talking about the redundant Flash memory, the mux/demux and arbitration circuitry. This means that if something on the Flash memory subsystem fails, it is simply described as a "Flash RAM" problem. I would suspect that the Flash memory would be consid
    • increased number of components means increased complexity. increased complexity means increased cost to maintain reliability. Cost increase much more than linearly. For non-humna missions, extra components not justified.

      Using redundant low reliability components is the cheap office solution, not the space exploration solution.

    • If they didn't have redundancy, they wouldn't be able to do what they are now. For starters, the rover is still operating. It's waking up and going to sleep. Secondly, it was able to detect the error, although it couldn't correct it automatically. Thirdly, it was able to transmit to its bosses at NASA that it was having trouble. And finally, it's still able to receive signals and commands of sufficient complexity to re-bootstrap itself without using the defective hardware.

      Seriously, you just shouldn'

    • First of all: obviously they've thought of that. Adding to what others have said in their responses tearing the parent apart, I'd like to mention that the problem is probably not due to a general defect in the RAM card. It probably has to do with the conditions on Mars, the landing, etc - in which case the same problem would be affecting all of the (even redundant) Flash RAM cards: so it really is amazing that they got this working at all.
    • Really,they shouldn't have one of anything

      I think you folks all missed the point completely. They have full dual redundancy on EVERYTHING in the MER program. Not only are the computer systems somewhat an issue, there's little issues like landing in one piece, etc etc. to that end, they built 2 full systems, packaged them on 2 different rockets, and fired them off a month apart from each other. this gave full dual redundancy to every system and every component, from the initial launch igniters, to ev

  • 2 years ago, back at NASA R&D... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:43PM (#8078386) Journal
    Engineer 1: Ho-hum.. Little bit of ... whatever it is, 'ere... Hand me that thingamajig, will you?
    Engineer 2: Yah, sure... Hey, remember that employee last month who got laid of within a week?
    Engineer 1: Who? Vincent?
    Engineer 2: Yeah, Vinnie... With the Italian accent?
    Engineer 1: Yeah, him. What about the guy?
    Engineer 2: Well, he has this offer on cheap RAM we just CAN'T resist!
    Engineer 1: Really now? But-
    Engineer 2: Look, our budget is already comparable to social welfare. We need to save some loot.
    Engineer 1: Fair enough, buy the crap and hand me the other twisty-turny thingy over there? I need to screw on this name tag reading... "Spirit"?
    Engineer 2: Look, it's either that or my wife's name.

  • Monday morning quarterback (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GGardner ( 97375 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:43PM (#8078387)
    If I was sending an embedded control computer to another planet, I would have chosen an OS with memory protection, not VxWorks. VxWorks is like DOS, and early versions of Windows, where one pointer problem in one task can corrupt the whole system. Sure, we don't know that's the problem now, but it would be nice to know for sure that it wasn't.

    • Re:Monday morning quarterback: RTOS tradeoffs (Score:4, Informative)

      by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:56PM (#8078466)
      If I was sending an embedded control computer to another planet, I would have chosen an OS with memory protection, not VxWorks.

      Actually, they might have protected memory if they use VxWorks AE RTOS/Tornado Tools 3.0 [findarticles.com]. Spirit uses VxWorks, but I don't know what version they used or when they had to commit to a particular version of VxWorks.

      Also, as the article mentions, memory protection adds overhead and can affect real-time performance. Hard real-time software cannot afford to have a complex layered structure and lots of conditional code that adds unpredictable delays. For that reason, many really real-time applications run very close to the hardware (for better or for worse.)

      • Re:Monday morning quarterback: RTOS tradeoffs (Score:5, Insightful)

        by GGardner ( 97375 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:15PM (#8078584)
        memory protection adds overhead and can affect real-time performance

        This is the conventional wisdom, and in my experience, this particular nugget causes more embedded and real time software projects to fail than any other.

        First off, on a modern PowerPC processor, memory protection (that is, without virtual memory support) can be implemented very cheaply. If you can do it just with the IBAT/DBAT registers, it should be a constant-time overhead, which is good enough for hard-real time. Oddly enough, I can't find a single reference on the net that measures the cost of memory protection alone on a modern CPU. Anyone? Anyone?

        Secondly, though the rover certainly may have some software components that have hard-real time requirements, that doesn't mean that every single line of code does. Typically, less than 1 percent of the code in a real time system is hard real time. In that case, you can run the real-time code in ISRs, or perhaps in a dual-mode system, like RT-Linux, or in high-priority kernel threads (as with QNX). In any of these situations, you can run all the rest of the code in protected memory space.

      • How about just simple ECC?

        Maybe I'm crazy but the systems I run that have ECC are incredibly stable even when using Windows. My Alpha got 100+ days uptime with daily use on Windows NT4. I have an old Xeon that easily did 40 days, and I shut it down by mistake.
      • From where I sit, I think they did damm good.

        I don't know that much about VXWorks, but I heard that one of its main assets is having a very small tight multitasking kernel.

        They were able to regain the system, despite loss of a major computational component. Remotely. Through a debug link. That sure says a helluva lot for the robustness of the OS and how they configured it.

        Good job, JPL.

      • Re:Monday morning quarterback: RTOS tradeoffs (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AaronW ( 33736 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @12:05PM (#8081656) Homepage
        As someone who has programmed VxWorks (including AE) for several years, I can say AE is a buggy piece of crap. We moved to AE for our project and eventually had to dump it since it was so buggy and slow. Also, as far as flash filesystems go, VxWorks ONLY SUPPORTS FAT, and not even FAT32, so it isn't a very robust filesystem. Not only that, because it's FAT there is no wear level support. I believe there also isn't the equivelent of chkdsk either. I also imagine that it can't handle faults in the filesystem (as if anything ever could deal with faults in a FAT filesystem very well).

        With VxWorks you can often get away without any filesystem because all the code is linked together in one big monolithic file. Separate tasks are not separate files (although you can have loadable object files).

        Yes, AE does provide memory protection domains, but it still doesn't clean up after a task dies. Sure, you can free the memory, but not open files, semaphores, pipes, or other things. Malloc in AE is improved over the braindead implementation in standard VxWorks, but it still has a long way to go. For example, it can't free up open file descriptors, semaphores, or other items associated with a task because a task usually isn't associated with it. So if you have a task that acquired a semaphore and dies, that semaphore will never be released.

        Hell, Wind River couldn't even get malloc right! Their malloc has got to be the worst implementation I've ever seen! They place free blocks in sorted order (smallest to largest) in a linked list after attempting to combine a new free block with neighboring free blocks. The next time you allocate, it walks the entire linked list until it finds a block large enough! In our case we wound up with tens or even hundreds of thousands of small blocks causing our watchdog timer to kick in because malloc became impossibly slow. AE improves this to use a tree instead of a list, but it still fragments. I ripped out the Wind River implementation and replaced it with Doug Lea's dlmalloc and all our malloc problems were solved, and the fragmentation went from tens of thousands of fragments to only a few dozen.

        For an RTOS being pushed for networking it isn't very good there either. It comes with an ancient BSD TCP/IP stack. If you have a device and want to see if it runs VxWorks, just run nmap against it. If it says TCP sequence number guessing is trivial, you can bet it's probably running VxWorks.

        In todays world, VxWorks doesn't cut it any more. Any complex project should choose a real OS like QNX or even embedded Linux over VxWorks. For realtime, Linux usually isn't very good, but Timesys appears to have solved that problem nicely.

        VxWorks isn't even that good at realtime. Usually you can't get any better resolution than half the system tick rate (usually 10ms), so you can't get better than 20ms of resolution in many cases.

        I've also heard many rumours that Wind River is dropping AE, or at least not pushing it. We're not the only ones to have been burned by it. I've heard of only one other company that used it, and they were also burned. I think it was a startup that went out of business.

        In VxWorks, all tasks share the same memory space. Think of every "task" as really a thread and you get the idea. In other words, if a "task" dies, the only way to clean up the system is to reboot.

        Also, VxWorks doesn't scale. The more tasks you have, the slower it runs (i.e. no O(1) scheduler). And with the shared memory, the more complex the code, the harder it is to debug and develop a stable system.

        QNX would have been a much better solution. In QNX, the core OS is very small, and if a task dies it can easily be restarted. In QNX, everything is a task with memory protection. The TCP/IP stack is separate from the core OS, for example, as are all the other drivers. If a driver crashes, it won't take the OS with it. Context switching in QNX is also very fast, faster than VxWorks even though memory protection is involved.

        -Aaron
  • I didn't even know they made rad-hard flash!
    • They don't. See DoD Bids [dodsbir.net] About 3/4 of the way down the page.

      Title: Rad Hard Flash Technology Abstract: The highest density radiation hardened non-volatile (NV) memory currently available is a 256 kbit EEPROM based on SONOS technology. One of the major limitations in developing rad hard NV memory has been the cost in bringing up the NV technology in a dedicated rad hard process facility, especially when weighed against the limited market size. One way to bring radiation hardening to an advanced electronic

  • Static Discharge? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by seven of five ( 578993 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:46PM (#8078408)
    Is there a chance that the problem could've been caused by electrostatic discharge? Rover bounces on rubber airbags on sand, bags fold up, Rover rolls off, Rover touches rock - zap!??

    • Re:Static Discharge? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by juglugs ( 652924 )
      Doubt it

      I'd hope that the RAM is in a shielded box given the amount of radiation it's getting from the sun and the rest of space.

      Could be Soft Errors caused by Alpha particles though - depends on the technology used in the flash - unlikely, but possible...

    • I had been wondering.

      The sequence of events that lead up to this was, IIRC,

      1. Rover extends arm ready to take a grinder to a rock.

      2. Contact with Rover lost due to bad weather in Australia.

      3. Rover bad.

      So it had just moved part of its structure closer to the rock just before this happened.

  • Cosmic rays... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bc90021 ( 43730 ) * <<bc90021> <at> <bc90021.net>> on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:47PM (#8078414) Homepage
    ...will apparently cause one out of every trillion bits on Earth to flip randomly... I guess with less of an atmosphere, it is a bigger problem on Mars! ;)

    • Re:Cosmic rays... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by shadowmatter ( 734276 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:37PM (#8078700)
      Funny you mention that. I'm taking a class on design of digital systems at my university, and my professor works for JPL. He helps design the control systems onboard space vehicles such as the Mars rover. Anyway, a majority of the class grade is based on an end-of-the-quarter project, which we complete in groups of 2 to 4. On Wednesday he expressed interest in a group developing some sort of redundancy for FPGAs that would be suitable in spacecraft. You see, on Mars, you're not shielded from huge doses of radiation as you are on earth. A healthy dose of radiation bombardment could easily reprogram an FPGA chip on the surface of Mars; ASICs chips are used to overcome this problem.

      Maybe he was gung-ho about anti-radiation redundancy because he already knew the likely problem of the Spirit. Who knows?

      - sm

      • Re:Cosmic rays... (Score:3, Informative)

        by mnmn ( 145599 )
        Rockets have blasted off into space since Sputnik1 and with all the communication satellites, we know alot about high-radiation electronics. We've had sun flares corrupting electronic equipment for decades and ASIC companies have entire lines of chips for high-radiation resistance, partly for military applications.

        So I think the rovers electronics are well protected from at least the Suns radiation. I think Mars is 1.3AUs from the Earth, making it 2.3AUs from the Sun, so it should receive less than a quart
      • I've actually consulted on this for another group inside my company. You don't wait for a cosmic ray to change a programming bit in an FPGA.

        You have two or more running in parallel. While one is running, the next reloads from ROM. When it's loaded and synchronized, you switch to it, and load the next one. You do that in series, over and over, so you're only using any particular FPGA for a couple of seconds at a time, and their configurations are constantly being refreshed. It's a very simple idea that can

  • Software / Hardware Breakthrough? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:51PM (#8078437) Homepage
    This is remarkable, and a testament to good software / hardware integration. It is true that I think this money could have been better spent elsewhere in terms of our understanding of the universe, but still, these types of projects and the hardships that come with them teach miles of experience in remote software / hardware problems.

    I do seriously wonder if these types of projects will tell us anything more than esoteric wonders of Mars, but from a strictly engineering standpoint, perhaps it's worth it after all.

  • The Full Story (Score:5, Informative)

    by DrunkenTerror ( 561616 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:52PM (#8078440) Homepage Journal
    Here [spaceflightnow.com] is the link to the real story. The one given in the /. acticle is getting pushed down spaceflight's page.

  • Nice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Omega1045 ( 584264 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:52PM (#8078444)
    I have a friend who works in the field. Space travel hoses electronics bad. Triple redundancy and over-engineering is the name of the game. This is nice to hear. I would imagine that something went wrong intransit or on-landing, but they can keep going,
  • I remember in the last thread about the rover, someone opined that it was bad memory, then proceeded to give a half dozen reasons why. Totally nailed it.

    You're all so damn smart. Sometimes I don't think I'm not worthy of posting here.
  • What's the OS on this critter??

  • flash ram is known to fail on writes after a while (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I know a lot of ppl are using flash ram in smaller computers for booting linux or what not. Well if they are writing their logs and other things to that flash be aware that you can only write to it so many times before it fails.

    Was NASA writing to that flash or just reading? A ram drive in flash sounds like it will access/write thousands of times a ?minute? This should wear it out quickly.
  • NASA has a report, and it's very bad news!

    Well, bad news anyway. Bad flash? Maybe it was the solar storms. Can't they knock out flash, at least in space?

  • Steal SOME (Score:5, Funny)

    by MajorDick ( 735308 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:58PM (#8078480)
    I mean like beagle isnt using its flashram anymore, just go and jack some off it. While your at it TAG the Beagle with some PRO-US graffiti :) hell maybe its got nicer rims too

    Seriously, can you imagine the first manned expiditon seeing the Beagle Jacked up, tagged , up on little martian cinderblocks, All that and we already got a head start on building martian cities
    • I mean like beagle isnt using its flashram anymore, just go and jack some off it. While your at it TAG the Beagle with some PRO-US graffiti :) hell maybe its got nicer rims too

      Seriously, can you imagine the first manned expiditon seeing the Beagle Jacked up, tagged , up on little martian cinderblocks, All that and we already got a head start on building martian cities

      What, like this [jacco2.dds.nl]? (from a comment [slashdot.org] in an earlier article).

  • Information on the MER hardware. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by elrond1999 ( 88166 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:01PM (#8078497)
    Ive been unable to find any hard information on the design of the MER memory systems. If anyone can point me to a technical brief id be very happy.

    From what ive pieced together the MER system is something like this:

    One RAD6000 powerpc cpu.
    Connected via probably compact pci to 128 mb of ecc sdram.
    256 mb of flash. No info on what make of flash, but likely Intel since they are the biggest. There was some info from the press conference that there are actually two flash chips and that the flight software is redundantly stored on each. So does this mean that there is actually 128mb of redundant flash? Also it was said that they had problems even with the redundancy, could they possibly have overwritten something? We all know that even a redundant raid does not stop filesystem corruption.

    No information on how the flash is connected, parallell / serial? How the redundancy works?

    Btw, I guess flash is rather radiation hard since they require 10 - 20V to erase / write.
    • Ive been unable to find any hard information on the design of the MER memory systems. If anyone can point me to a technical brief id be very happy.

      RAD6000 6U Compact PCI [baesystems.com] page at BAE Systems.

      It's not great, but there are more detailed links around the BAE website.

      It doesn't list how the FLASH is connected; that's not a standard built-in on the RAD6000 computer. I would guess, hung off the FPGA interface device, but I don't know that for sure.

    • No info on what make of flash, but likely Intel since they are the biggest.

      As far as I know, the biggest in Flash RAM is AMD, with the Atmels and Winbonds coming distant second. And Intel is among them.
  • NASA should never have used a Sony WHITE memory stick with built-in DRM. That rover probably took a picture of something that looked a little too much like a Disney character, and - bam - total shutdown!

    They should stick with purple next time.

  • The handle on their problem is a very good thing.

    Knowing about the problem before the twin lands is probably a good thing because they might anticipate the problem.

    But if it takes weeks to fix the solar panels on the lander will be degrading in the martian atmosphere. The will miss the down time for Spirit's task list.

    It must be so frustrating to sit on a possible fix and wait for a communication window, or computer response to see if you're right.

  • Salute the Helpdesk (Score:5, Funny)

    by Papa Legba ( 192550 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:10PM (#8078555)
    I have had some tough calls in my time but I have never had to walk a robot 283 million miles away through brain surgery. Man I am glad I did not get that call. This is going to blow there call averages all to hell. I raise a cup of Joe to you, Rover Help Desk man.

  • last photo from Spirit (Score:5, Funny)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:12PM (#8078564)
    This is the last image received [kentidwell.com] prior to the recent issues with Spirit...
  • I know those guys at NASA are smart... so does anyone know why they sent opportunity right after spirit? I would think it would be better to wait and see if any problems occured with the Spirit, and learn from their mistakes. I'm sure there is an optimum aligning of the planets for a launch... but is that really so rare that they couldn't wait?
    • This close approach was truly historic; the last time Earth and Mars were this close was 60,000 years ago. Moderately close approaches are more common, but it will still be 284 years until the next such very close approach event.

    • The present series of orbiters/landers (Nozomi, Mars Express, Spirit, Opportunity) were launched at such a time as to take advantage of the most optimal Mars-Earth configuration for something like 60,000 years. I believe the bottom line is that it was a time you could get the most science there for the least cost of launch.

      Shame on my fellow American who said we should strip Beagle 2 and leave it up on cinderblocks. If Beagle is ever discovered to have soft landed, I would think the only proper thing to do
  • Oh, shite (I'm struggling not to swear trollish gibberish!)... how can the fools even think of using flash in a space mission? What's most rad sensitive that a bunch of trapped electrons hovering on a thin isolation layer tweaking a threshold voltage?
    • you're right, those morons at NASA, with there PhDs and years of experience, don't know what the hell there doing.

  • Opportunity (Score:4, Interesting)

    by loconet ( 415875 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:18PM (#8078600) Homepage
    Opportunity is fast approaching [nasa.gov] the red planet. It should be an interesting night at JPL. Execellent work guys, good luck.

  • that line from armageddon comes to mind... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MoFoQ ( 584566 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:25PM (#8078633)
    where the russian cosmonaut says "American components, Russian components. They're all made in Taiwan!"

    • Re: Technically... (Score:3, Informative)

      by MachDelta ( 704883 )
      I hate to be a nitpick, but the exact quote (with context) is:

      Andropov: Excuse me, but I think I know how to fix this.

      Watts: Move it! You don't know the components!
      Andropov: [annoyed] Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!!!

      Oh, and he has another quote I liked too:

      Lev Andropov: This is how we fix things on Russian space station!

      [hits panel with tool]

      But maybe I just like it because thats how I tend to fix things too ;)

  • Damn! Where's a Wal-Mart when you need one?

  • As someone else said (Score:5, Funny)

    by Viadd ( 173388 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:48PM (#8078744)
    The Spirit is willing, but the flash is weak.
    (Posted by Jane Slee and John Stracke in separate usenet postings.)

  • Thank God (Score:2, Funny)

    by mtfbwy ( 131640 )
    They didn't use Windows CE. Remember the diplomat months back that got locked in his 7 series BMW because of a computer crash? :)

  • Nasa TV (Score:4, Informative)

    by Nucleon500 ( 628631 ) <tcfelker@example.com> on Saturday January 24, 2004 @10:45PM (#8079053) Homepage
    If you don't get it on cable, you can watch NASA TV here [nasa.gov].

  • We need open source rover software (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HangingChad ( 677530 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @12:21AM (#8079373) Homepage
    I'd put the /. community up against NASA any day. Instead of trying to be so secret about everything, open the software up to the community and let the collective propose solutions to some of these issues. Hey, it's our tax dollars developing all this stuff, why can't we play too?

    Besides robot exploration software would be handy right here. It would be neat to be able to send a research bot out in the deserts, deep oceans and jungle canopies of the world. Machines can go where we can't.

    Individually you can be damn annoying sometimes, but I'm constantly amazed and delighted by the collective intelligence of the /. pack.

    • I was going to mod this one up, but I decided to give this reply some more emphasis by actually replying with some thoughtful encouraging words instead.

      It would be nice to be able to have some folks at JPL throw down the source code and engineering schematics and say to the geek/space/engineering community at large "We have a problem here and could use your suggestions to see if we can get this fixed."

      This (the mars missions) is obviously a big hit, as measured by replies on Slashdot, the number of hits on the website at JPL, stories in mainstream media, and other reasonable metrics to gague popularlity of a project. I'm sure that there are several geeks out there that wouldn't mind digging into the source code.

      The only reason I could see the engineers not wanting to do that is to open themselves up to obvious scrutiny for poor engineering and coding. (Whadda you mean the global variable named temp is the only variable. We also have temp2, temp3, and temp4. What do the numbers mean in those mean? You can get it from context, can't you?) That and some people just aren't used to allowing other into their "domain".

      Being 100% funded by public money should also be further reason for why this should be opened up. I also totally agree.

  • Cut it out! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @12:41AM (#8079449) Homepage
    OK, you dorks (you know who you are) need to stop postulating about the memory failures having to do with static electricity, martian dust, or lack of redundancy. This is JPL and (the one case of metric vs. standard aside) they thought of all the obvious stuff during the design stage. Do you really think they're slapping their foreheads and saying "the dust! we forgot about the dust!" over in the design lab? Get real, people.

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