NASA Loses Rover!?

[Kevin Watson]

Originally Posted by Skabana159

Does anyone close to NASA know what could have gone wrong?

They're still trying to figure out what's going on. The leading theory is that the flight software may have a bug that caused the hardware to "safe" the rover until it could "phone home", which has happened.

-Kevin

[Adam Y.]

Another article
Aparently the rover is reseting itself day and night. Why? No one knows and the rover can not even make up it's mind. The thing keeps on reseting for differnt reasons.

[KenWittlief]

Interrupts = evil!

[Clark Gilbert]

Press Release - January 23, 2004

"We should expect we will not be restoring functionality to Spirit for a significant amount of time -- many days, perhaps two weeks -- even in the best of circumstances," said Peter Theisinger, rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Thought this was interesting.

Spirit's flight software is not functioning normally. It appears to have rebooted the rover's computer more than 60 times in the past three days. A motor that moves a mirror for the rover's infrared spectrometer was partway through an operation when the problem arose, so the possibility of a mechanical problem with that hardware will be one theory investigated.

"We believe, based on everything we know now, we can sustain the current state of the spacecraft from a health standpoint for an indefinite amount of time," Theisinger said. That will give the team time to work on the problem.