Instrument on Mars Rover 'Spirit' Malfunctioning

Posted by michael on Saturday August 9, 2003 @08:30AM from the get-out-and-fix-it dept.

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."

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Re:I always wondered... by jericho4.0 · 2003-08-09 12:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

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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