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Instrument on Mars Rover 'Spirit' Malfunctioning

Posted by michael on 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."

3 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. I always wondered... by neglige · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Mission engineers think they may be able to partially fix the spectrometer before it arrives in January.
    How do they do that?! I mean, they can't reach up there, they can't physically fix anything. They can't turn that screw an inch to the left.

    Please, someone who knows, enlighten me... Can it really be done by making changes in the software (given that this is possible)?

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    1. Re:I always wondered... by jwdg · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Well, the article says:

      The remaining theories focus on an apparent problem in movement of a mechanism within the instrument that rapidly vibrates a gamma-ray source back and forth.

      "The Mossbauer spectrometer on Spirit is working, and even if we don't come up with a way to improve its performance, we'll be able to get scientific information out of the data it sends us from Mars," Squyres said. "But it's a very flexible instrument, with lots of parameters we can change. We have high hopes that over the coming months we'll be able to understand exactly what's happened to it and make adjustments that will improve its performance. And if the Mossbauer spectrometer on Opportunity behaves on Mars the way it did today, we'll get beautiful data from that instrument."

      This implies that they don't necessarily need to fix the software, just recalibrate/ change the configuration parameters. So something is not up to spec, but that doesn't really matter because they can tweak other parameters to compensate.

      scp new_values.conf science@spirit.nasa.gov:/etc/mossbauer.conf

      thinks Now, how do we kill -HUP it :)

  2. Regardless by MacEnvy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think that even if the spectrometer is only partially fixed, it could provide good data to scientists here on the ground - not to mention the dozen other sensors. From other reports (CNN, NYTimes), people are talking about this as "another one of NASA's failures". Not at all, the mission can be 95% successful even without this particular iron spectrometer.

    Go NASA! Kick some ESA ass!

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