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ZL2VAL > ROVERS 07.02.04 11:54l 78 Lines 3137 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Spirit healed, Adirondak brushed off
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From: ZL2VAL@ZL2AB.#46.NZL.OC
To : ROVERS@WW
Mars Rover Spirit Update: 'Our Patient is Healed'
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 04:00 pm ET
06 February 2004
The computer woes of the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover appear to be
solved. The robot is now being readied for wheeling itself to a
large-sized crater within the Gusev Crater landing site.
All indications are that the memory surgery on Spirit "worked extremely
well," said Jennifer Trosper, JPL's Spirit Mission Manager. She said
that the patient is healed of a computer overload problem, fixed by
carefully erasing and reformatting Spirit's flash file system.
Spirit is in great health, Trosper said during an early morning press
briefinSpirit healed, Adirondak brushed off
tablished even more so out there
at Mars."
Science duties by Spirit include giving the rock nicknamed Adirondack
the brush off.
Thanks to a brush on the robot's Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) a surprise
coating on Adirondack was whisked away, said Stephen Gorevan, Payload
Lead for the RAT and head of Honeybee Robotics in New York. "This was a
big surprise - the greatest interplanetary brushing of all time."
Today, Spirit will use the RAT to help scientists glean more information
about Adirondack's internal composition.
Spirit is expected to begin driving on Saturday about 270 yards (250
meters), on a step-by-step jaunt toward a crater nicknamed Bonneville.
"There's going to be a lot of driving on Spirit," Trosper said.
Scientists are eager to study the walls of Bonneville for geological
clues regarding the history of Gusev Crater.
Bug in our court
Glenn Reeves, JPL's Flight Software Architect for the Mars Exploration
Rover (MER) project said that sorting out what ailed Spirit was a major
effort, one that has now led to stabilizing the problem and debugging
the robot's software.
The investigation into the computer glitch is still on-going, Reeves
said. "This is definitely a bug in our court that we have to fix."
"The first problem is that we ran out of memory. A subsequent problem
after that is we managed to corrupt the file system," Reeves said. "In a
sense, we're back to the beginning...and I think at this stage we?re
very confident that we understand what the problem is. We have a
procedure in place - to work around this problem indefinitely if we have
to," he said.
Reeves told SPACE.com that the computer issue on Spirit has the same
potential to crop up on Opportunity. Procedures have been put in place
to prevent the software glitches from reoccurring on Spirit and showing
up on the Opportunity rover on the other side of Mars, he said.
==============================
73 de Alan
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Points to ponder
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Ever notice that the people who are late are often much jollier than the
people who have to wait for them?
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