Curiosity Rover On Standby As NASA Addresses Computer Glitch 98
alancronin writes "NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been temporarily put into 'safe mode,' as scientists monitoring from Earth try to fix a computer glitch, the US space agency said. Scientists switched to a backup computer Thursday so that they could troubleshoot the problem, said to be linked to a glitch in the original computer's flash memory. 'We switched computers to get to a standard state from which to begin restoring routine operations,' said Richard Cook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the project manager for the Mars Science Laboratory Project, which built and operates Curiosity."
Re:Glitch or flash memory failure? (Score:5, Informative)
TFA pretty much covers this, saying they believe it is a problem in the flash memory.
The computer problem is related to a glitch in flash memory on the A-side computer caused by corrupted memory files, Cook said. Scientists are still looking into the root cause the corrupted memory, but it's possible the memory files were damaged by high-energy space particles called cosmic rays, which are always a danger beyond the protective atmosphere of Earth.
They also say
"We also want to look to see if we can make changes to software to immunize against this kind of problem in the future," Cook said.
It seems that, since the same thing happened on one of the earlier rovers, this is something they would have done some time ago.
They are now updating the B side computer so it can manage the mission while they work on the primary. I wonder why this is not something that is kept up to date anyway. I can see keeping B an update or two behind A to prevent a single programming error taking both of them down. But after you are satisfied with A's software load, why keep B so far back-level that transition takes so much time. And since the computers are said to be identical, why the desire to move back to A?
Re:Robust hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Who else has a feeling that someone fitted in a module backwards?
Either that, or a dead cell or two.
Nobody who has read TFA has that feeling. Curiosity has been running since Aug. 6, 2012 on your putative "backwards module".
Re:Robust hardware (Score:5, Informative)
This may be of some interest http://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html [cpushack.com]
Re:Glitch or flash memory failure? (Score:5, Informative)
They are now updating the B side computer so it can manage the mission while they work on the primary. I wonder why this is not something that is kept up to date anyway. I can see keeping B an update or two behind A to prevent a single programming error taking both of them down. But after you are satisfied with A's software load, why keep B so far back-level that transition takes so much time. And since the computers are said to be identical, why the desire to move back to A?
When are you "satisfied" with software like this? Imagine something comes as slow corruption or only occurs when a certain counter overflows or whatever, you don't want to be caught in a race against time to save the system before the B computer dies too. Which is probably the reason why they want to move it back to the A computer, if it can't run there then they don't have a backup anymore. It's better for them with a slightly reduced system with backup than a B computer running with no backup. It does them no good to sit on the ground and say "well, we've figured out how what happened and how we could have fixed it" after you've lost contact, then it's game over. You don't run it in "if it breaks, we're done here" mode unless you really, absolutely must.
Re:Gotta love Armchair Quarterbacks and their simp (Score:4, Informative)
Newtons or pound-force? [wikipedia.org]
I don't think anyone is suggesting that simple mistakes were the cause in this case - but the above link may help explain why a little leg-pulling by slashdotters is not crossing any lines.
"Peace out"
Re:In space cosmic ray excuse never gets old (Score:4, Informative)