Spirit 'Will Be Perfect Again' 331
G. Holst writes "NASA technicians are preparing to wipe Spirit's flash memory clean of science and engineering files that have stymied its software. The fix, likely to be made Friday, could completely restore Spirit. "I think it will be perfect again," says the Mission Manager. Chalk this one up for earth!" There are numerous stories about Spirit and Mars: one describes being careful with rm -rf. Reader Tablizer sends in an interesting site: "I discovered Bill Momsen's website where he describes his experiences working on the first successful photographic mission to another planet: Mariner IV to Mars."
My question (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean could VxWorks be responsible for not being able to function with the Flash RAM filled?
Courageous engineers! (Score:5, Interesting)
Early Spring Cleaning? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone here know why they bothered to keep the files? Wouldn't they want as much space as possible for the scientific data?
Re:Any theories on what caused the corruption? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mars Rover (Score:5, Interesting)
This is truly a wonderful age to live in.
Re:What Filesystem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's the usual rant you see here on slashdot, and it's true: since it was closed source, we couldn't verify that we'd caught all the bad cases, and we couldn't submit the fix to back to WindRiver.
Re:Like that joke.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:My question (Score:5, Interesting)
files=30
well, that basically told the OS how many files it was going to have to handle at any given time.
Well, in the case of Spirit, it's not that they were short on flash or RAM, it's that the portion of RAM used to handle the files in flash when the flash filesystem is mounted grew unexpectedly for some reason (kinda like the frames in conventional memory you used to access extended memory in DOS). They think the problem was that this portion of RAM used to handle Flash files was not big enough for the amount of files they had in the flash (including files from 6-7 months in transit and a couple of days on the ground in mars).
Soooo, a quick (ok, maybe not so quick) rewrite of the routines in the OS for this flash-files-handling-RAM-portion should do the trick.
Bottom line, it WAS a bug that could only surface with thousands of files in flash, which is something they didn't try on the ground.
Pretty much OT but an interesting question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Any theories on what caused the corruption? (Score:3, Interesting)
Security? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mars 3D Images (Score:1, Interesting)
I've been wondering the same thing. (Score:0, Interesting)
What kind of authentication does NASA employ on deep space transmissions? Surely nothing as complicated as SSL. Probably not even anything as simple as frequency division multiplexing.
My guess would be no authentication whatsoever [think 1970s protocols, like SMTP, and the attendant proliferation of SPAM], so it seems like anyone with a big dish could just point and shoot.
If I were a NASA scientist... (Score:3, Interesting)
Each rover uses 256MB flash and so does my 5 megapixel camera. I know for a fact that I can saturate that space fast in a photography frenzy, so I carry a laptop in the car with charger to transfer everything to it if I'll need more pictures.
Altho the two rovers have been a staggering success on Mars, I am surprised at two overlooks:
(1) Keeping track of file size and free space.
(2) What happens if the space is full.
Even Linux on a measly ARM720T does a much better job.
Wow, scary (Score:2, Interesting)
As a friend put it "I am afraid to flash my bios without a good UPS."