Spirit Rover Communications Error

cybrthng writes "Through yesterdays press release and the current Nasa Briefing there is news that they are having communications errors with contacting spirit. Is she lost or is it something akin to the Pathfinder failures that happened? Or did little green people claim an expensive tonka truck toy?"

Comments

Let's hope its just software

[Anonymous Coward]

But Spirit was only transmitting "pseudo-noise", a random series of zeroes and ones in binary code and not anything the scientists could decipher. - BBC News

It sounds like we still have power and an antenna. Hopefully its just some software error will need a reboot to correct the problem. I think they were late debugging this stuff and actually had to upload the software after the launch. Maybe they missed something.

The only issue I heard was some voltage spikes when the high-gain antenna was rotated. They were not reproduced but perhaps some underlying problem has occurred.

Up to now, NASA has made this look so easy. This is a wake-up call. Putting robots unto another planet is still an epic achievement and so much is left to go wrong even after the landing is over.

Let's hope this is just a red screen of death and a reboot will shake things loose.

Maybe Garbled Commands?

[cflorio]

"A rainstorm in Australia yesterday interfered with commands being uplinked to Spirit. At that time, the spacecraft sent a short signal indicating it had received the instructions but engineers said the strength of the uplink was much lower than desired and that not all of the commands got through."

Is it at all possible that getting half commands or garbled commands has confused Sprit?

INFORMATION ON THE PATHFINDER/SOJOURNER FAULT:

[Featureless]

I thought it would be interesting to dig up and re-read the accounts from the last time there was a "serious" software glitch on the ground on Mars:

• Part 1
  
• Part 2 (more detail)

There's a lot of rumor and inconclusive news about Spirit floating around right now, so this is entirely subjective, but I'm getting the feeling this, too, is a software fault of some kind. Put most simply, you could interpret what we're reading right now as "we received the ACK tone for our instructions but didn't get the data back we expected."

These kinds of problems are not unprecedented, and furthermore I'm under the impression there are options for dealing with even serious OS-level trouble that would shock and awe the average general purpose computer user.