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?"

Really unfortunate

[mknewman]

NASA really doesn't need any bad news right now. Hopefully they will be able to work around this problem. Marc

not as bad as it sounds.

[mlyle]

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:Opportunity

[pvt_medic]

pity, NASA really needs a success that this mission was turning into. They cant afford another big failure (granted this is only part of the mission and the sister rover is scheduled to land soon) but its a black eye to an already bruised image.

Software Error

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, one of the possible causes is a software error. That would be worrying, as there is a set of (presumably) identical software about to land on Mars in the next few days.

Nothing to see here, move along

[forkazoo]

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

Re:Mars is a dangerous place

[Short Circuit]

I disagree completely. The presence of people would make missions much more likely to succeed in a variable environment. There's nothing like a good engineer's ingenuity, a screwdriver and a soldering iron to get out of a tight spot.

Marswalks ought to be much simpler and easier than spacewalks, so repairs should go a lot faster.

Re:not as bad as it sounds.

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

A call for manned missions

[Thorizdin]

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.

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

[Jubedgy]

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).

Beagle

[feidaykin]

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.

hey europe...

[BTWR]

hey europe,

First off, I'm American. Remember when you were complaining that non-EU people were being very rude, immature and annoying when they laughed at Beagle 2's failure, and then many Americans (wrongly) justified it by saying that Eu people had mocked NASA's mars failures for the last 4 years? Well, they were wrong, you were wrong.

I was sad that Beagle was lost (science >>> pride - that data woulda helped everyone). Now that Spirit might be lost, now's your chance to prove you can be mature and respectful too.

Re:Really unfortunate

[Jugalator]

Half the mission was a success. Let's hope at least half of US rover mission will be a success too.

Re:Opportunity

[Uma Thurman]

Nothing on Mars is exactly as we expect it. The landing site for Opportunity might appear to be less scientifically interesting from orbit, but I think once the lander is down there will be all sorts of neat things to get excited about.

Re:Somewhere deep in the bowels of NASA

[dasmegabyte]

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

Re:Beagle

[barzok]

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.

Counterpoint

[Gorimek]

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.

Re:Java bot

[inertia187]

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:Ha ha

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

I think France is familiar with Vietnam as well... Dien Bien Phu anyone?

T'aint so

[rk]

The Meridiani Planum landing site is smack dab in the middle of a large (as in spotted from space using the MGS Thermal Emission Spectrometer) bed of gray hematite. In addition there are spots of lower albedo in the features there that seem to show greater hydration. Couple that with the data from Odyssey's Gamma Ray Spectrometer that shows an extra hydrogen abundance there and it's a prime candidate for a bunch of near surface water.

Gray hematite is a ferrous oxide crystal that normally forms on Earth in water, especially in hot springs and the like. It's a great place to go if you're looking for signs of water. This is the only place on Mars we know that shows gray hematite in any large quantities.

The Meridiani site is easier to get to than the Gusev site, but that doesn't make it look scientifically less interesting.

Re:Opportunity

[Bromrrrrr]

Sorry, but is it really that serious? I read the article but I wasn't able to listen to the .wmv. The article didn't seem that gloomy, only some glitches. The rover is still responding but didn't send the data that was expected.

Don't tell me the .wmv told you that all hope was lost. Please? :)

Re:Newsconferece replays

[Bendebecker]

I wonder if americans wrote the software or whether it was outsourced to India? After all you get what you pay for...

Re:Mars Defense System

[Cujo]

100% lame and tired.

Re:Jawas.

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

He then tried to sell a reporter an R2 unit with a bad motivator

I hate to be picky, but that was an R5 unit. [starwars.com] The dead give away was the more cylindrical head than the R2 units have. [starwars.com] And before someone mentions that the droid on Owi-Wan's ship in Attack of the Clones was an R4 unit [starwars.com] with a spherical head like the R2 units, that was something that bugged me from the first time I saw that movie...

(ok, ok, my 4 year old son loves the Star Wars movies...)

Maybe it didn't contact NASA, but ESA

[thrill12]

Something stuck to my mind regarding the frequency on which the ESA and NASA spacecraft operate (Beagle and Spirit), as said in a press conference by ESA on the Beagle situation (07-01) [beagle2.com]. Apparently, they are both using the same frequency to phone home.
Now ofcourse this is for 99.99999% certain not true, but what if Spirit got a bit disturbed when it suddenly found it was receiving CRM-2 mode communication from the Beagle [beagle2.com]. Beagle's CRM-2 mode should be starting around now if it is still in one piece... It would be like a vague (different) television picture on a perfect TV-channel, but it could just be the case for Spirit to go loopy.
The timing is right, are the environmental conditions ... ?