Spirit Rover Communications Error

I found it! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 06:24 · Score: 5, Funny

On www.ebay.mars/landers/used.

BSOD by Augusto · 2004-01-22 06:24 · Score: 5, Funny

Somewhere in Mars, a little robot has a screen with the Blue Screen of Death.

--

- sigs are for wimps.

Re:BSOD by borroff · 2004-01-22 06:29 · Score: 5, Funny

Of course, it's too early to eliminate the use of the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
Re:BSOD by Witsu · 2004-01-22 07:00 · Score: 5, Informative

Spirit runs an Operating System called VXWorks, by Wind River.
Re:BSOD by itsabouttime · 2004-01-22 08:23 · Score: 5, Funny

I'm not sure its running anything now.
Re:BSOD by Bendebecker · 2004-01-22 08:34 · Score: 5, Funny

VXWorks

Obviously it doesn't...

--
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy

WHen we finally get humans there.. by Maeryk · 2004-01-22 06:24 · Score: 5, Funny

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?

not as bad as it sounds. by mlyle · 2004-01-22 06:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:not as bad as it sounds. by bill_mcgonigle · 2004-01-22 06:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

I am assuming that you have insider info? Or are you just playing the part?

He probably gets NASA TV on his TV system. I'm watching it now and they're going over this stuff. There's a press conference ongoing.

--
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Re:not as bad as it sounds. by mlyle · 2004-01-22 06:35 · Score: 5, Informative

By now they have probably rebooted it (forced it through safe mode to clear any software fault; space vehicles never really go all the way "down"), so if it's still happenning I would say it's either a hardware fault or corruption of essential software or data in (putatively) nonvolatile memory (not unreasonable in high-rad environments).

Not impossible, but relatively unlikely with deep-space grade hardware. It'd require a double fault to create a detectable error, and more than that to create an undetectable one.

If they haven't forced it through safe mode, then they're not too worried and are more interested in characterizing the problem than getting on with the scientific mission. Which is a good or a bad thing depending on which sort of information is more valuable. I'm sure the guys in the software group have their bias.

They've had one day, and much of that was spent thinking the problem was because of thunderstorms/atmospheric vapor near Canberra and dish tracking problems were causing communications errors. It's important to get some idea of the problem before you go shoving things into safe modes because you may make things worse (if it's a power bus fault, for instance).
Re:not as bad as it sounds. by GMontag · 2004-01-22 06:37 · Score: 5, Funny

I have narrowed it down.

1) It is a hardware problem. OR

2) It is a software problem.

I lean towards (1) as nobody that I work with created the software for this device.

--
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Re:not as bad as it sounds. by Ummagumma · 2004-01-22 06:40 · Score: 5, Funny

Nah, he just stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

--
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Re:not as bad as it sounds. by Waffle+Iron · 2004-01-22 07:03 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
Hopefully, that would work. However, it will be pretty annoying if all of the images it sends back after that are 16-color 640x480 GIFs with the words "Safe Mode" overlayed in the four corners.
Re:not as bad as it sounds. by mlyle · 2004-01-22 07:46 · Score: 5, Informative

I meant a synchronization problem between the physical transmitter unit and the main avionics system.

When it comes to clocks, it is somewhat complicated. The rover keeps a clock, and usually finds earth by locating the sun in the sky. It has a set of keplerian/rotational elements for both Earth around the Sun and the MGS/Odyssey around Mars, and thus knows when they rise and set in the sky. This tells it when to transmit and where to point the antenna.

Full duplex communications are possible on xband, so transmitting and receiving do not need to be synchronized. Blocks of data are sent with error correction codes-- as they arrive intact, messages are sent telling the rover to delete them. Retransmits can also be requested if the data is particularly interesting and missing (but often aren't, as witnessed by the number of empty portions of images.

UHF is usually just used to offload additional data from the rover during the night to the satellites. The delays are short and the protocols are thus more conventional.

A fatal exception 0E has occurred..... by flinxmeister · 2004-01-22 06:25 · Score: 5, Funny

Please restart your rover. If the problem persists, contact support@nasa.gov.

Re:A fatal exception 0E has occurred..... by Sloppy · 2004-01-22 07:13 · Score: 5, Funny

The horrible thing is that they restarted it, and now it's on a screen that says, "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue."

--
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.

Ha ha by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 06:25 · Score: 5, Funny

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!

Let's hope its just software by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 06:25 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Re:Let's hope its just software by dubl-u · 2004-01-22 06:59 · Score: 5, Funny

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

The Martians probably just upgraded the codecs.
Re:Let's hope its just software by Megane · 2004-01-22 08:03 · Score: 5, Funny

a random series of zeroes and ones in binary code and not anything the scientists could decipher.
Ah, that would be the NSA encryption kicking in. Actually, there was one decipherable message: "I'm sorry, JPL, I can't do that."

--
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }

Re:Mars Defense System by PowerBert · 2004-01-22 06:28 · Score: 5, Funny

No, this ones down to Beagle.
It was never intended to send the EU any data, it's a Special Ops lander.
It's spent the past month hunting down Spirit Rover and maintinaing radio silence.
Spirit will be on the end of a solar powered swiss army knife by now.

Re:It escaped!! by N3WBI3 · 2004-01-22 06:29 · Score: 5, Funny

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..

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certainly the communications software. by fireduck · 2004-01-22 06:30 · Score: 5, Funny

given that NASA uses real player for their briefings, they're probably just stuck waiting for the "buffering..." message to finish.

Jawas. by nagrommit · 2004-01-22 06:31 · Score: 5, Funny

The Jawas came along in their sandcrawler and took the rover. I've seen this before.

--
http://www.timmorgan.com

Bush knew about this in advance! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 06:32 · Score: 5, Funny

Now he can justify that manned mission to Mars: Someone has to go press Ctrl-Alt-Delete on Spirit to reboot it!

Somewhere deep in the bowels of NASA by g-san · 2004-01-22 06:36 · Score: 5, Funny

Is one really smart pissed of engineer saying I TOLD YOU THIS WAS GONNA HAPPEN.

Maybe Garbled Commands? by cflorio · 2004-01-22 06:36 · Score: 5, Interesting

"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?

Re:Maybe Garbled Commands? by captainClassLoader · 2004-01-22 07:49 · Score: 5, Informative

There's much more detail about this here.

Apparently, Tidbinbilla is one of only 3 stations tracking Spirit from Earth. If it's out, they have to wait until Spirit is visible from over the horizon at another station before they can communicate.

--
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier

Re:Mars Defense System by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 06:37 · Score: 5, Funny

Face it. We're not going to find Mars' WMD until we send troops there.

Oh wait...

Re:You poor deluded fool... by hesiod · 2004-01-22 06:39 · Score: 5, Funny

> 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.

Beagle by feidaykin · 2004-01-22 06:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

First let me say I hope this problem is fixed. Next let me say even if it is not, Spirit has done some wonderful things already and that sure beats going boom before it ever lands like so many before it.

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

Re:Beagle by barzok · 2004-01-22 07:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?
I have not been one of those people, but NASA/JPL still got the hardest part right - they successfully landed and operated the rover for a few days (and got good data back), rather than losing it entirely and never knowing what happened to it.
Touchdown is the most dangerous, hardest part of the operation to get right. Beagle didn't do that (we assume), Spirit did. Beagle got to the vicinity of the planet - but we've been successful many times in hurling an object at Mars and getting it in the neighborhood.

Now they know by WormholeFiend · 2004-01-22 06:43 · Score: 5, Funny

now they know what happens when you try to grind a strange "rock" shaped like a pyramid.

Richard Hoagland is gonna be soooooo all over this. /tinfoil

Last transmission.. by iamsure · 2004-01-22 06:47 · Score: 5, Funny

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

Damn viruses by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 06:51 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Re:Damn viruses by zCyl · 2004-01-22 09:20 · Score: 5, Funny

Maybe the Beagle was infected with the Slammer.

Well, Beagle's failure probably did have something to do with slamming.

ping went out and the pong came back by chongo · 2004-01-22 06:56 · Score: 5, Informative

According to mission manager Jennifer Trosper at the end of their 1810 UTC (22 Jan 2004) news conference:

" If the spacecraft believes it's in a fault mode, its command rate should be 7.8 bits per second. We sent a beep today, this morning, about the time that we came down here to talk to you. We sent a command that says if you get this send us a beep. And I'm told from Richard that Jennifer came down here to tell us that they think they got it! That would tell us that the spacecraft thinks it's in the fault side of the tree some how for some reason. That would mean that we have got positive power, some elements of the software is working, once again the Xband system is working ... the SSPA, the multispace transponder, all that stuff is working so that would be more information .. good news. We need to confirm that. Data off the DSN sometimes needs double checking. We'll let you know if that's for sure."

Stay tuned ...

--
chongo (was here) /\oo/\

Re:The most annoying thing... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 06:58 · Score: 5, Funny

In related news, SETI@Home has deciphered it's first alien message, it read:

"Which one's the any key?"

Spirit status updates by feidaykin · 2004-01-22 06:59 · Score: 5, Informative

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

Re:Mars Defense System by N3WBI3 · 2004-01-22 07:04 · Score: 5, Funny

Dont mess with mars..

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Mars Rover Interface on Earth by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 07:24 · Score: 5, Funny

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!

Re:Mars Defense System by Tablizer · 2004-01-22 07:35 · Score: 5, Funny

Yes, I must admit that I was hoping more than a little that this news of lost contact would be accompanied by a last few photos taken by the Spirit, showing some shadowy figures approaching the rover and posing for the camera.

here

--
Table-ized A.I.

Re:Java bot by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 07:42 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

INFORMATION ON THE PATHFINDER/SOJOURNER FAULT: by Featureless · 2004-01-22 07:46 · Score: 5, Interesting

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:

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!

Martian Conservatives by stuffduff · 2004-01-22 08:27 · Score: 5, Funny

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?"

Contact Re-Established! by Picass0 · 2004-01-22 08:44 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Response from the rover by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-22 09:30 · Score: 5, Funny

The latest communication feed has just arrived. Strangely, the only imformation transmitted is:

> Y0ur r0v3r i5 0wn3d!

Re:Don't worry, it's just taking a rest by prog-guru · 2004-01-22 11:26 · Score: 5, Funny

OK, so the Spirit rover rolls into a bar. Rover says to the bartender 'excuse me,' bartender ignores him. Rover again says 'excuse me,' bartender ignores him. Martian says to bartender, 'Why don't you answer him?' bartender says 'I know that type, all they ever want is water.' :)

--

chris@xanadu:~$ whatis /.
/.: nothing appropriate.

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