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Instrument on Mars Rover 'Spirit' Malfunctioning
deglr6328 writes "During the first in-flight checkout of both mars rovers this week it was found that the Mossbauer spectrometer on the first launched "Spirit" Rover was not functioning properly. The instrument is intended to be used on the surface of Mars to examine the composition and magnetic properties of Iron containing minerals in rocks. Mission engineers think they may be able to partially fix the spectrometer before it arrives in January. All other cameras and instruments on both rovers checked out ok."
Seems entirely possible that they could fix at least some things in software. It could be something that just requires them to program in some sort of compensation factor. Since they seem to think they can only partially fix the problem, then there may be hardware issues that they can't correct via software.
Another aproach is simply to try to figure out exactly what went wrong, and recalibrate. For instance, in the failed instrument they might have a sample of known copisition. Reading this might give them enough data to 'fix' the thing by massaging data returned from it.
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