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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?"
chalk another one up for the mars defense system.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
I'm really praying for Opportunity now. We may really need that rover if some good data is to come out of these missions.
On www.ebay.mars/landers/used.
Somewhere in Mars, a little robot has a screen with the Blue Screen of Death.
- sigs are for wimps.
Why do I suspect we are going to find all of the assorted junk Mars has eaten, neatly disassembled and stacked in piles according to the flag painted on the equipment?
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
A considerable number of things have to work properly for the rover to be in its present state. Mars Global Surveyor received a carrier on UHF but no data, confirming that the UHF antenna, amplifier, and tranmitter are functional. The fact that it transmitted at the correct time (at night) indicates batteries and power systems are at least mostly functional, and that the spacecraft computer/avionics system was able to calculate the time of the MGS pass.
Also, NASA's DSN (Deep Space Network) has been able to send commands asking Spirit to send tones on X-Band, and has received the response tones back. This confirms that at least the low gain antenna, antenna switch, x-band receiver, and x-band tone transmitter are functional.
Perhaps a software fault or a synchronization problem with the radios is preventing valid daa frames from being transmitted. The fact that so much is known to functional argues against a failure that will incapacitate the spacecraft indefinitely. In the coming days, if communications are not restored, the spacecraft will enter safe modes that cause it to try harder to transmit and will reset subsystems. I am optimistic at this point.
Please restart your rover. If the problem persists, contact support@nasa.gov.
Silly Americans. Beagle was, in actual fact, a saboteur machine, and it has been lying in wait for your little buggy to attack!
Score one for our defence department. God save the Queen!
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.
From the press release: similar events occurred several times during the Mars Pathfinder mission So a friendly "Don't Panic."
"Oh Goody! My Illudiom Pew36 Explosive Space Modulator!"
[end carrier]
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I sure hope this does better than some of the others so far.. Otherwise we might already know it's fate.
Hmmm.
Some custodial technicial at a large airplane hangar shaped building in northeastern florida or southern california accidentally pulled the CatV cable from the patch panel.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
AFAICT, this is not a Big Deal. They recieved acknolegement from the rover, they just haven't heard anything since. It's certainly possible it went haywire, and flipped itself over, and is now just doomed, but it seems unlikely. Sojourner managed to survive comms glitches, and I'm sure this buggy will, too. Hell, it's not like dropped packets are unheard of on the Internet, and we still manage to read slashdot every day.
I suppose if I was ambitious, this would be a good time for a joke about sSFGKJL%% NO CARRIER
The BBC is reporting it here.
/* This sig is disabled. Press CTRL-W to enable. Thankyou */
Somewhere deep within its electronics, there's an error that was trapped. The message, which would be displayed if only there was a monitor onboard,
simply reads:
Doh.
Lesson learned: be sure to handle your exceptions properly.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
We all know whats going on, the Martians hot wired it and are joy riding around. The green bastards also painted flames on the side and put a tacky neon license plate mount on the front..
given that NASA uses real player for their briefings, they're probably just stuck waiting for the "buffering..." message to finish.
It's a hoax. Nasa knows that space exploration will never capture the minds of the people unless it appeals to the least common denominator, just like nascar. They want to introduce car crashes into their missions to revitalize people's interest in the program and to increase funding.
Its been reported that a signal was sent to Spirit this morning to try and figure out whether it was in fault mode or not, and preliminary results suggest that Spirit is in fault mode. This is preliminary data and was announced half way through the news conference.
There is as of yet no reliable information as to what the state of Spirit is.
But I like my writeup better :P
"ghettoboy22 writes "Multiple news services are reporting the Martian Interplanetary Defence Force (MIDF) has successfully captured an extraterrestial craft codenamed "Spirit" on the outskirts of a small village in Lower Gusev province two days ago, coming on the heals of the successful downing of another invasion craft last month. Speculation has insued from Spirit's handlers on Earth who are suggesting the craft was hit with the much feared Martian "Cosmic Ray" computer viri, causing it to speak nothing but jibberish. No worries though - our buddies will have their work cut out for them when Spirit's sister-ship "Opportunity" makes it's decent from Martian orbit in T minus 58 hours!""
The Jawas came along in their sandcrawler and took the rover. I've seen this before.
http://www.timmorgan.com
Now he can justify that manned mission to Mars: Someone has to go press Ctrl-Alt-Delete on Spirit to reboot it!
Is one really smart pissed of engineer saying I TOLD YOU THIS WAS GONNA HAPPEN.
Is it at all possible that getting half commands or garbled commands has confused Sprit?
All you Martian explorers are belong to us.
Whoever sets up the Martian Automobile Association is going to make a lot of money.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
> You've obviously never lost your last 75 cents in the snack machine at 3 AM!
I don't see it as losing 75 cents, per se, but gaining a shitload of change when I kick the fuck out of the machine... and I still don't have the damn chips.
While this is a serious setback it illustrates an important point that many seem to have missed. Its damed _hard_ to operate a complicated piece of equipment you can't deal with in real time or even near real time. The rover is some of the best science we have deployed to another planet and I am sure many will point to this and say that is an indication that we should send more rovers and robots to Mars before we even consider sending people. I disagree with this point, since in many cases a human could avoid problems or work around them in ways that a robot currently cannnot. I don't believe that human life is cheap at all and every effort should be made to keep explorers safe, but believing that there will no cost in human life in our quest to explore the stars is just naive. I would rather our next step to be deploying a manned orbiter around Mars, with the intention of being able to drop far less sophisticated robots and rovers who are controlled by humans orbiting above. This gives a great deal more flexibility and makes incidents on the Red Planet much less likely to cause a mission to be a complete multi-million dollar/euro failure.
Mars Crossing Over
with John Edwards
"I see . . . red rocks! Lots and lots of red rocks! Does that sound familiar?"
"Why, why yes!"
"Now, did this Spirit have . . . are they wheels?"
"Oh, oh yes, yes, Spirit does have wheels! Please, ask it if it's OK!"
"It says it's on a flat, red plain covered with red rocks, and that it's found life and water and everything there is peaceful and cool."
"Oh, thank you, thank you Mr. Edwards!"
Stefan
Mars ISP finally cut him off the network. That rover was transmitting a lot of data.
Free XBox, PS2
See.. Beagle didnt fail.. it transformed. Out came the titanium pick on the air cylinder, and the saw blades on the grapple arms.
And it sat.. covered in martian dust.. WAITING for Spirit to leave its safety nest in the landing pod..
the only thing missing is an announcer trying to sound worked up over the idea of two robots tearing each other to pieces!
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Now I'm going to say this: would all the people that bragged about NASA/JPL doing so much better than the Beagle team be quiet?
Guess what. Landing a complex machine on another planet is not easy. It's simply amazing humans can even do this at all. When something goes wrong, we can't exactly reach out and tap the little thing a few times to see if it fixes it.
The teams behind both Spirit and Beagle did excellent work against the insane list of Things That Can Go Wrong in getting something from here to there. Both teams did their best, and both teams make me feel very proud of the human race.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
now they know what happens when you try to grind a strange "rock" shaped like a pyramid.
/tinfoil
Richard Hoagland is gonna be soooooo all over this.
They were just saying there are many sequences of events that could cause this. If it sensed the battery was overly discharged it will stop sending data & wait for a recharge. It could be as simple as this.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
I@$hri89&Q24gtr24gr
Which translated to..
"We 0wn3d j00r b0x f00lz! S3nd L1nux b0xez N ch1cks n3xt t1me!"
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
I believe the Rover is just haging out at the Mars Bar.
Sorry...
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
NASA knows what's up, they just don't want US to know! They now have live video feeds from Spirit showing Mohammed living it up with his virgins (well, they were virgins a few thousand years ago). But since Bush the Zionist is in control of every step NASA takes, he doesn't want anyone to know that the Muslims are right! The great evil empire is covering up the truth! Mars is heaven, Venus is hell, and he's doomed us all to Venus!
He is intentionally making us all evil to work in his sulfur mines that will be on Venus when we arrive in Hell! Won't SOMEONE PLEASE think of the children!
(Don't mod me down for trolling, it's a joke. Don't like it? Ignore it, probably means you have good taste in humor.)
Maybe the Beagle was infected with the Slammer. That would explain why Beagle never called back, and why the Spirit stopped responding shortly after coming into radio range of the Beagle.
They haven't quite given up on Beagle 2 yet. For the last few days its controllers have not sent any communications to Mars. Assuming that the lander is in one piece, it should now have switched to a beacon mode which will transmit throughout the Martian day.
ESA will begin listening for Beagle 2 again over the weekend, but this is very much a last-ditch attempt.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Stay tuned ...
chongo (was here)
Reuters - Bitter unsuccesful UK rival, 'Beagle 2', accused of slamming into 'Spirit' out of jealous rage.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Spirit status updates are here: http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly .html
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
The NASA CEO issued a statement in which he said the repetitive and excited tone of a late night infomercial he watched left him utterly convinced that Miss Cleo could indeed communicate with the the Spirit and all problems should be fixed by Monday.
He also touted the hire as a money saving measure because 'most communications with the Spirit tend to last about 30 seconds, but with Miss Cleo the first five minutes is only $1.95!'
was there there was a malfunction between the table saw blade and the Speak & Spell.
You know what?
Did you know that like a dozen people a year get killed when rocking (top heavy) vending machines, which fall and crush them.
:)
The lesson here is clear. Don't kick the machines. That's immature and dangerous.
Instead, return with a baseball bat
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Or, more clearly, what do the operating routines look like? Does anyone have a flowchart that would show the data flow? What sort of error checking is done on incoming data? What sort of encryption is done on incoming/outgoing data? (Cartoon bubble: I picture a script kiddie with a powerful transmitter sending SQL injection to Spirit...)
What does the system do if it determines it has had an unexpected result/crash? How is such a system designed and tested?
I've never thought about it before - but a system like this must have redundant levels of i/o security, internal error checking, exception trapping, and some sort of self-repair, all built within multiply redundant systems.
Would any details of the embedded system architecture / program structure be available to the public?
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Some things get simpler with humans around, but many also get harder. Remember that manned missions to Mars cost something like 100 times more than unmanned. Measuring how much you get out of it per billion dollars is the interesting measure, not how much you get per mission.
Ahem. Spirit's on Mars. The MAF failed it. Give credit where it's due - this was a Martian Army operation.
The Martian Air Force gets to try and redeem themselves this weekend.
I'd say something about the Martian Marine Corps, but of course, we can't keep our damn probes working long enough to find out if the Martians need a Marine Corps.
Yeah, that's funny. It may not be too far from the truth. the particular Java implementation they're using is realtime, so they can tune down or completely turn off garbage collection. Threads running with no interruption from garbage collection have a heap penalty, so they have to be really careful when to put a thread in that state.
IANAJPLR (I am not a JPL researcher) but I'm sure, however, there's a whole bunch of fail-safes that would kick in so that the worst case scenario is a loss of one day's worth of scientific data, if that.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
I've seen the interface they use to control the rover. It's text based.
You are standing in an open field west of a red rock, with a crusty appearance.
There is a small mailbox here.
>open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet.
>read leaflet
(taken)
"WELCOME TO MARS!
The software running onboard the MER rovers is not written in java. Not even a little bit. Sun's posters and propaganda at last year's JavaOne seemed to deliberately give that false impression. There is plenty of Java running on the ground, though, for both planning activities and processing the downlinked data.
Personally I prefer a good side kick. It leaves you with space to hop out of the way, and if done right will get you several items and some spare change
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
- 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.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Then it would REBOOT after a critical error!
The Meridiani Planum landing site is smack dab in the middle of a large (as in spotted from space using the MGS Thermal Emission Spectrometer) bed of gray hematite. In addition there are spots of lower albedo in the features there that seem to show greater hydration. Couple that with the data from Odyssey's Gamma Ray Spectrometer that shows an extra hydrogen abundance there and it's a prime candidate for a bunch of near surface water.
Gray hematite is a ferrous oxide crystal that normally forms on Earth in water, especially in hot springs and the like. It's a great place to go if you're looking for signs of water. This is the only place on Mars we know that shows gray hematite in any large quantities.
The Meridiani site is easier to get to than the Gusev site, but that doesn't make it look scientifically less interesting.
Jennifer Trosper, Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover project ...
"The rover remains in excellent shape for trundling over to the nearby crater," Trosper said. "The spacecraft continues to amaze me. There's nothing to make me think that this vehicle isn't going to last a long time," she concluded.
Oops.
But one of our first satellites (I worked for a very small satellite firm) had a debug terminal for informational messages it spat out as it ran. No, we never expected to receive a keypress on this terminal... but we did most of our testing with this terminal because if something went wrong, we'd want to be able to see the error messages.
When we tried to run the satellite without the terminal, the low level hardware CTS/DTR loopback wasn't present and the satellite hung when it tried to send its first character to the console. We caught that only a couple weeks before shipping the thing, too!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
...to have an engineer on scene to fix it.
Robots are great until they break.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
UNIVERSAL NEWS SYNDICATE - MARS The Martain Government announced today that it has suspended any direct communication between the rover and earth until it has ascertained if any code on the rover constitutes a potential violation of SCO's IP suit. A spokesbeing for the ruling faction said off the record that the suit 'really has them turning green.' To which Darl McBride replied 'If it's green I want it!'
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Good news - The Spirit rover has contacted JPL!
Bad News - It has detected a new device and is asking for the Windows Install CD to be inserted to continue.
Nothing runs Windows in this respect. The Rover runs custom code for the Rad 6000 chip they use in the vxworks RTOS, and the mission control systems use Java to run a live version of Meastro.
Also, the chip they use, a radiation hardened 6000 CPU comes from the days before Java was even thought of. Read up on the facts first.
Pathfinder in it's 1997 landing (04JUL1997) suffered a series of unexplained system failures. David Wilner CTO of WindRiver Systems, the creators of WxWorks the realtime embedded system kernel talked to IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium at a later date explaining how they solved software bugs in the system.
this article explains how they solved the problem - by including the debug code with the os. I remember reading about this on /. some time ago. A detailed account can be read here by Glenn Reeves (JPL Mars Flight SE).
Windriver systems is supplying the OS for the current mission. Lets see how long it takes them to work this one out :)
links:l r itative_Account.html
www.kohala.com/start/papers.others/pathfinder.htm
research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Mars_Pathfinder/Autho
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
The latest communication feed has just arrived. Strangely, the only imformation transmitted is:
> Y0ur r0v3r i5 0wn3d!
Why are the Martians assumed to be green when they live on a red planet?
I had a pet ferret name Ishido, who somehow knew how to climb into a vending machine and release all sorts of goodies. I didnt' teach him this but one day at the laundry mat he snuck up into the machine in the soda tray then after a minute of calling at him about four sodas and a ferret fell out. surprisingly he could repeat the trick.
Err, did you read the link?
priority inversion can be protected for however the mutex can be coded in two states. Priority Inversion Safe and non priority inversion safe. Unfortunately they forgot to turn the priority inversion protection on. Programming error, plain and simple.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies