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Spirit Sends Debug Information to Earth
gfilion writes "NASA has released a
press release that says: 'Shortly before noon, controllers were surprised to receive a relay of data from Spirit via the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Spirit sent 73 megabits at a rate of 128 kilobits per second.'" They've been having communications troubles with Spirit since Wednesday, so it's good to hear from it again, even if the data is just filler.
Forego the obvious
128 kBits/sec! Quite a bit up from the ealire 100Bit/sec. Too bad Mars is too far from the next CO to qualify for DSL
(first post?)
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
A diagnostic is what runs when nothing else will.
...but the ping times suck. Can you imagine playing Quake over that kind of link?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Spirit sent 73 megabits at a rate of 128 kilobits per second.
:)
Pretty damn scary that that's faster then most pr0n download's via Kazza...
I watched the press conference on NASA-TV and they talked about how the thing wouldn't go to sleep at night and so it got me to wondering about the low power question. Obviously they have the rover power off when power gets to a certain level, but what if that level is slightly off?
In other words, if the onboard CPU has enough power and continues to run but the memory doesn't have enough power, doesn't that cause all kinds of wackiness?
They keep talking about the data pointing to simultaneous faults... well, as programmers we know these are the very worst kinds of bugs to deal with, but with something as (I'm assuming) well written as their code, so doesn't that point to a memory problem? I mean, the think is working flat-out beautifully one moment, and then the next moment it goes tits up.
The other question I had concerned this motor they had turned on but which didn't complete its sequence. When they command the motor to do something, do they tell it to run for some interval of time, or do they tell it to achieve a specific position? I was thinking that if it's the latter, and then if it gets stuck somehow, this could create the low power situation as the motor just grinds away.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
shutdown -r now
128kbps to mars. I don't even get that to the Internet. Now I feel jellous. (stuck at 28.8kbps because SBC can't build a phone network)
.. is this the rover calling for help? It may have just "come back to" and realized something was wrong.
Trolling is a art,
CNN is reporting that spirit is self-rebooting 60 times a day. NASA suspects a hardware fault that is causing the processor to detect trouble and automatically reboot.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
&^@%$@ WJS&&# D&@#&&# DD
im sorry dave i can't do that
&*A^S^ DJHDHSHA ASHHASD&@^%@@ DD&D^^@
Cnn has an article on some updates. Apparently the engineers been having all sorts of fun with the thing here a quick excert. "Cautioning that they will need more time to understand what went wrong, project engineers said they have determined that Spirit has rebooted or tried to reboot itself more than 60 times a day since the failure."
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Only a couple of frames were fillers of random values. Most of the frames were engineering data. No actual scientific data came down, though.
Still, it's a good sign that it's still able to talk.
The rover is running VXWorks.
It's nice to know that NASA engineers threw debugging code in the mix. Otherwise, we'd have a $410,000,000 junkyard on the red planet.
I don't know what I'd do if I didn't get to see high resolution pictures of dirt and rock every day.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Suspend mode never really works after a while, does it?
Beagles EMP weapon has been declared a partial failure after NASA received debug information from their ROVER even after begle activated its weapon!
You might want to check your facts before you spew. While the ground system is heavy on Linux according to the article you referenced, the actual OS on the rover itself is VxWorks from Wind River.
http://www.windriver.com/news/press/20040105.html
This space for rent.
Spirit Sends Debug Information to Earth
A Fatal Exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C0231810 in VXD VMM(0D) + 00001810
Cool!
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
The little green men finally got thier hands on it... and haven't quite figured out how to put it back together again.
Hmm... I hate to admit it but this probably a fair comment.
Failure rates on RTOS's is a known metric. If they used commercial hardware and commercially used software, did they check out the numbers? I would be surprised if Linux beat out QNX as the most reliable embedded operating system.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
128 kbps over 35 million miles... looks like we'll need another benchmark to replace the station wagon full of DAT tapes
one better than mcleodeight
sitdown -r now
IIRC... The 'Spirit' rover runs VxWorks.
Why is it that you do not know this? mmm?
kill elrond
take elrond
put elrond in cupboard
Receiving transmission...
..
..
Download completed at 128 kbits, playing...
Unknown Error!
.
Unknown Error!
.
Receiving transmission at 128 kbits...
ALL YOUR ROBOTS ARE BELONG TO US!
The transmission included power subsystem engineering data, no science data, and several frames of "fill data." Fill data are sets of intentionally random numbers that do not provide information.
They don't say why it's sending fill data, but I bet the NASA geeks are happy about getting that engineering data.
If we could put a man on the moon with slide rulers, we should have no problem figuring out how to three-key a computer on another planet
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
At 73 megabits, that's a lot of BSOD. Oops. Sorry. Red Screens of Death with Spirit being on Mars and all.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
128 kBits/sec!, i'm running at 256k up and 512k down, and my connection and computer didn't cost the $400m or whatever it was. NASA should shop around instead of going for whatever ISP approaches them first.
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
Maybe Wind River will not be so quick to brag now :)
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
I agree, I think Linux certainly has a very long way to go to match-up to QNX, though to be fair one targets servers and the other targets life support-like machines in Hospitals, but Linux isn't anywhere near QNX, and shouldn't even try to be, and shouldn't be expected to be.
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
It's not a fair comment, it's a troll. The rover runs VxWorks.
I will be quite interested to see how debugging goes. I have always enjoyed finding such problems myself and the added bonus of it being on Mars makes it that much more interesting. This is quite different from the old Apollo days. Good luck NASA and I am praying to the byte god for you.
Did the "filler data" look anything like this?
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Doesn't Spirit's twin, Opportunity, start it's landing tomorrow?
It's probably some bizarre licensing issue for the OS causing it to shut down as it's detected that NASA are trying to run two copies at the same time.
Kind of like Beagle 2's problems caused by the transmissions being intercepted by the RIAA as they file a lawsuit against Colin Pillinger for offering illegal music downloads from Mars.
Fortunately, the cause of the blackout has been located and will be corrected soon.
Pesky Martians! :-)
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
It appears that while editing the crontab of the rover to send spam, the script-kiddie accidentally added a shutdown -r 24m . "Having the rover send spam was a great idea! When people ping the X-Originating IP, they'll surely timeout!!"
I saw over at the windriver site that this thing
has a proprietary os and only on cpu and only one set of code. Now come on how frigging smart is that? Hell back at work I even have redundant clusters for nearly everything. Relying on a single computer that is a few hundred million miles away is, should I dare say? Retarded..
Got Code?
To Crisitunity (viz. Opportunity, the other rover, Chinese saying, and The Simpsons).
Has anyone cracked this yet?
-bk.
Is it using Swing?
"I can't swim.. I CaN'T sWim ... I cannot swim... I can't swim.. I can't swim.. I can't swim.. I can't swim.. I can't swim.. I can't swim.. sdf@#$@#$@#$
This is my sig.
Segmentation fault. Core dumped.
A Spirit technician:
"Oops.... they downloaded my 73-MBit secret mars blog! Thank God I encrypted it!!"
rover: 128kbps
most mp3's: 128kbps
COINCIDENCE?
i think not.
From the windriver site....
Power and versatility was delivered via the advanced applications developed for each of the robotic functions of the Rover devices, plus their communications links with the landing craft. VxWorks not only served as the ideal development platform for the engineers, it also had to be sufficiently robust itself to ensure it would perform according to plan under the extreme conditions on Mars and during the journey from Earth.
To bad it never makes it to run level three sounds like init is dying..
Got Code?
...European, constantly rebooting, battery draining overlords. Now we know Beagle 2 was not lost but was in transit to Gusev crater. It took a little time to silently creep up behind spirit. If we had a high-enough resolution camera we would see that damn dog continuously poking at the rover, pressing our reset button.
Cheers to the European engineers who caught us with our pants downs and jeers to the American engineers who thought our little rover needed an external reset button for some reason.
Some of us Engineers work with RTOS all the time, not just for fun-and-dandy projects, for for multi-million dollar outcomes. Consensus is that Linux is not good enough. QNX, VRTX, VxWorks etc are still the preferred choices, but everyone admits that Linux is getting there. Most of us don't hang out on slashdot, yet many Linux zealots do: you don't get a good opinion here.
Could this filler not be the echo of the FOX network of last night?
Extreme Remote Debugging
Sigs are bad for your health.
so the martians have found it, disassembled it, and reverse-engineered our communication tech
great
How many times do I have to say it? Robots just dont work for shit. Why dont we just send up some of those hyper-intelligent monkeys that we sent to the moon. I mean seriously it would cost a lot less. And then theyd make movies, how cool would it be to see another movie about a chimp doing what a human could do a billion times better?
prolly the x-raying and alpha-raying ...
their planet was considered an attack on
mars.
so the marschen hit back
:) hmm so I suppose this opinion isn't good since it 's on slashdot. Nothing to see here, move on folks.
Great the probe has a faster connection than I have. Now I've got to go live on mars
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
I'm wondering if this is a software glitch running on Spirit and if so this truly does call into question the competence of Wind River, the people that wrote the code in use inside of Spirit. Why doesn't NASA hire its own programmers instead of hiring another firm to write it for them?
Keyboard error. Press F1 to continue.
I would love to see the length of pringles cans used to make the WiFi antenna to get that signal back to earth.
you remember, the Apollo 13, the one with Tom Hanks? Where the austronauts believe that their transmission is watched by the viewers on Earth but in fact all TV networks refused the transmission, stating that NASA made flights to the Moon as exciting as trips to Pittsburgh (or something of this kind)?
This is what is happenning people, the new in reality TV - our own Mars Rover - The Ultimate Survivor. The Opportunity will be landing today, so the audience should be able to vote for which rover is going to be kicked out of the show.
The Drama, The Excitement, The Unknonw, The Sex... oh, wait!
You can't handle the truth.
that it is not Java serialized objects they are receiving to debug...
Just how much debug info could this beast store and/or transmitt live?
At 128kbits (peak) thats what 8 seconds to dump the ram, 16 seconds to dump the flash memory.
It still amazes me that a machine this low speced does what it does.
Isn't the little rover surprisingly similar to number 5? I don't think there are thunderstorms on Mars, but if they can't get Spirit to behave properly maybe they just need to promise they won't reprogram it...
They're also trying to get some shots of Beagle 2 to see what happened.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Is it just me, or has anyone else been very puzzled by the pics that NASA released of Sprit's landing site? These were supposedly taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor.
I thought that the best cameras in orbit around Mars were those on the European Mars Express, with a top resolution of 12 metres/pixel, and yet here the Spirit lander, about 2 metres aross, is spread across about 10 pixels.
Something's not right...
How often is a bug the fault of an RTOS, and how often introduced by the coders working on a particular project?
May we never see th
I once downloaded 1.9 gigs (Linux) at 2.8 kbytes/sec (Modem).
Spirit Sends Debug Information to Earth
"Press any key to reboot the Spirit now."
It won't to go sleep despite two direct commands?
Ever heard of dog years, i.e., seven for every human year?
I think we just found the rate of "spirit years," because this is clearly just a rebellious adolescent rover.
You're right.. it's an elaborate publicity stunt.
All will be revealed on SUNDAY!, SUNDAY!, SUNDAY!!!!!
All the way out at Mars, they get 4 times the bandwidth I can get here in New Jersey... But the content isn't any better :-)
When the last lightminute is no problem but the last mile is?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
NASA's Spirit rover did not go to sleep today even after ground controllers sent commands twice for it to do so.
It looks like NASA is experiencing a common parenting problem, I suggest something like this for the rocket scientists
73 Megabits is pretty large for a coredump.
Badass Resumes
A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C000068F in VxD 0028:C000059F8. The current application will be terminated.
Fill data is typically transmitted when the telemetry multiplexer does not have any engineering or science data to send. Due to the way synchronous communications links work, something is always being transmitted, even if there is no "real data" available.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You have your latest backup, right?
Isn't debug info excactly what they want now?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Knowing Nasa's past problems of metric conversion, I wouldn't be suprised if they put the wrong fuse/breaker rating on drill module.
Everything will be ok once low tide in the Gusav Sea occurs.
They need high speed broadband.
I wonder how long it will be until JPL start getting messages back from spirit saying:-
iNPut INpuT InPuT inPUt
Maybe number 5 is alive?!
(For those of you who don't get the reference, it's the film "Short Circuit")
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
If you were to logically verify all the code to prove there were no bugs anywhere (yes, this is possible), it would cost orders of magnitude more to develop (which is why nobody ever verifies an entire program).
Tell that to Professor Turing...
Is it quite possible that NASA engineers simply have not mastered the art and science of designing hardware and software operable in the harshest of environments?
While I would never claim that NASA is perfect, I think you underestimate the both the engineering challenge of putting a rover on Mars and the impact of more conservative, get-it-right, policies.
Interplanetary missions are the hardest of all because the engineers never get to actually test the whole device under realistic conditions. Although they can test and analyze each subsystem under a variety of simulated or near-realistic conditions, they have no way of building a test rover, putting it in interplanetary space of months, having is aerobrake into a thin atmosphere, parachute in a thin atmosphere, and crashland at high speed, and then operate all its mechanical parts under dusty low G conditions.
Second, get-it-right == conservatism == greater cost == fewer missions == less experience. The last thing NASA should do is spend more money, take more time, and do fewer missions. The only way we will really learn how to operate in space is to go into space. I'm not saying that better engineering won't help, only that more experience (unfettered by excessive conservatism) is a crucial part of learning to operate on other planets.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
60 reboots is nothing, the engineers just forgot to turn off Automatic Updates...
OK, which one of you posted the URL to Spirit's onboard webserver on Slashdot???
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I often enjoy the depts. on /. but not so the Randy California line. You could've derived the EXACT same humour more sensitively with "from the Fresh Garbage dept."
Astro
Wait until Mars Express takes a picture of the Rover. Then we know what exactly happened. My guess is that its drill is still stuck in that big stone.
Do you really think Spirit and Beagle II were sent to Mars to gather scientific data?
WRONG!
It's about beeing the interstellar robot fighting champion, you fools! Geeks from NASA and ESA are just sending battle bots to Mars in an absurd attempt to waste European and American taxpayers' money.
I mean, think about it! First, Spirit kicked Beagle II's ass, and the guys from NASA already celebrated their victory. But now, it seems that a domestic contestant gave Spirit a heavy beating on wednesday; ergo its problems since then.
To have some actual technical discussion on a site that is supposed to be filled with nerds, instead of the same tired jokes about martians.
The more you know, the less you understand.
I suggest, if you do not on DSL or cable, that you log offline so as to free the line in case Hawkins would like to chat with you about your theories.
Aliens are gonna find this and think we're mini-figs!
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Energy Policy
Just wondering whether it will work too...
a) oops, I get confused because in grade school the slide rule said we had to go one at a time
;)
b) It's compute and calculato
ass
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Here's an idea: how about adapting the software that runs cars? That is surely tried and tested stuff, very robust, and almost never crashes. Those systems are of comparable complexity, and like the rovers they have very limited variable input (unlike a home computer).
Maybe instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on kleenex-frail gear and reinventing the wheel at every opportunity, how about spending all those millions on more fuel to send up heavier, more robust vehicles? Didn't that work for Apollo?
I mean, these vehicles that are supposed to run for months in a dust pit are built in a clean room for god's sake...
A-Bomb
Be afraid...
It runs VxWorks, you peckerhead. Jesus, do any trolls even try anymore?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I submitted this 24 hrs ago & it was rejected. How is it news a day later?
Yay! Let the conspiracy theories begin! My vote is for Spirit's true location is behind a Wiggly Piggly in New Mexico.
Stick it up your ass 'Win-zealot', or whatever faith-based OS you prefer to use.
I'm not flaming because my story wasn't submitted but if you felt it was news you might want to find out why your editors rejected it yesterday as news.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Maybe if Bush didn't invade Iraq, he could have given that 87 Billion to Nasa instead. In the mean time they have to do the best with what they have.
I agree it's wrong to just put NASA on a pedestal, but analyze their success as well as thier failures, and be sure to compare it to the other space agencies out there. I think they are doing a pretty incredible job accomplishing lots of things that have never been done before.
With that said, lets see how Opportunity does tonight!
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
(AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History.
Your project can be any two of these: fast, cheap, or high quality. Nasa seems to be pushing numbers 1 and 2 these days.
Since Spirit is rebooting sixty times per day, a problem that started when an electric motor moving its spectrometer "conked out", one thinks first of a hardware failure, possibly leading to software corruption.
I don't know the boot sequence of Spirit, but in most battery-powered embedded systems with which I am familiar, an elaborate state machine design is made to ensure that, when the boot sequence is complete, the system has sufficient power to perform any task that may be requested of it. Since the power supply is limited, an unexpectedly heavy load on the primary supply could cause the supply voltage to the microcomputer to fall below its specified lower limit, leading to a system reset.
Now imagine that there is a hardware failure associated with some process that runs during the boot sequence--a voltage regulator turn-on, a heating system initialization, an electric motor activation, whatever--that results in excessive current drain. When this part of the boot sequence is reached, the supply voltage falls, and the microcomputer resets. This disables the problem-causing hardware, unloading the power supply. When the supply voltage recovers, the microcomputer reboots (either automatically, with a power-on reset, via a watchdog timer, or via some other means) and, when the critical part of the boot sequence is reached, the supply voltage falls again. The system is now in a continuous loop, in which it can remain indefinitely. (Or at least 60 times per day....)
Note that this situation can also arise due to a defect in the power supply--if the output impedance of the power supply has risen for some reason, its output voltage under lightly loaded conditions can be acceptable, but it may not be able to supply heavier loads.
One expects the Spirit power supply to be complex, with separate regulators for the microcomputer, radio transceiver, and electric motors, so looking for common circuits and systems would be the first thing to do when troubleshooting for this type of failure. Looking for system conditions that can cause a system reset would be another; the JPL people have lived with their systems for years now, and would have had many design reviews to identify possible system failure scenarios--I'm not telling them anything new here. I understand that the system telemetry received yesterday indicates that the power supply is within specification, so that seems to eliminate that possiblility.
The second alternative is a soft memory failure of some kind, either caused by a supply failure as the parent suggests or perhaps by a radiation event of some kind.
Note that these problems can be multi-disciplinary; for example, the problem could be caused by some vibration when a motor runs that loosens a broken connection created by a chemical reaction to something on the surface (to take an extreme example).
128 kilobits per second
Isn't NASA still running everything on the same hardware they used for the Apollo missions? The old 286 processors and so on? If that's the case... how did they manage to get such a high transfer rate? A 286 doesn't have a fsb anywhere near that.
Learn something new.
Your rover Spirit is in trouble, do you want to:
a) Ford the crater
b) Suck the poison
c) Reduce rations to meager
d) Go hunting
Since nobody seems to have posted this yet:
>From: jstracke@centive.com (John Stracke)
>Organization: Centive
>Subject: The Problem with Rover
NASA has lost touch with the first Mars Rover; it's responding to pings, but they can't get any telemetry back. I think I know what's happened: the onboard computer has gotten confused and decided all its images are underexposed, so it's diverted power to charging the capacitor for its spotlight. You see, the Spirit is willing, but the flash is weak.
You must have missed all the inane speculations on the Rover's problems being a result of running some form of Microsoft product.
Is there any reason the code, schematics and CAD designs aren't available for public viewing? Its a publicly funded project, and I don't think JPL has to worry about trade secrets.
If JPL would give us more information, I bet they'd have 50% of the entire engineering brainpower on the planet checking for races, inversions, memory leaks, hardware design flaws, etc.
If there was ever a project that could benefit from so many eyeballs, its space exploration. There are thousands of some of the most talented engineers on the planet who would jump at the chance to contribute to something like this.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
... so they could claim their on-site guarantee.
But would OpenSource on the Spirit have been a good idea? NASA could have written it, used embedded linux, whatever then released the source after the fact.
I would imagine if some problem happened like what is happening they could release the debug data and quite literally pull in extra 1,000's of minds to work on the problem.
Good idea? bad? why?
-- taking over the world, we are.
they should've used .net instead of java :)
Despite what seems to have become a widely held belief that we can learn as much from automated probes as from manned missions, it doesn't seem to have worked out that well in practice. Viking had a set of experiments that was supposed to definitively detect whether life was present. But when some of the experiments came out positive, they ended up being rejected, because researchers at home came up with nonbiological explanations. Unfortunately, there was nobody on site to do a follow-up experiment to really answer the question. Now we've had a long string of failed probes.
Perhaps all Spirit really needs is somebody to give it a little kick.
"I'm sorry JPL, I'm afraid I can't do that..."
This sig is intentionally left blank
I bet it either ran into magnetite or a radioactive rock.
:P
becauseit suddenly conks out, it might have gotten interrupted, that or an electromagnetic wave got it.
mars serves its name well, god of war and hostility, etc..
and mars is one unfriendly place.
they say we should colonize there, bah, let's focus on objects closer to earth atm, like the ocean or the moon first..
at least the moon has protection from the sun somewhat IIRC, and it's much closer.
and the ocean, whatever happened with making bases under the ocean?
though it's not as fun as doing something in space..
Cold mornings, tractor won't turn over. Spirit needs a jump start. I wonder if Opportunity has jumper cables?
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
... can no power corrupt absolutely?
...that's more bandwidth to Mars than most of the people have on earth :-)
Alex.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
"Get me a faster connection!!!!*insert random bits here*"
Anyone remember that when you are dealing with space, the CPU must be no faster than a 486 due to trasistor size? Yeah, just kind of ironic being that I remember playing that 128 kbps mp3 on a 486 slowing it down so much that I really could not do anything else useful on the computer... Damn you RIAA
Darl McBride would be sending Lawyers to Mars.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
So exactly what is the operating system that runs Spirit? And if the answer's Linux, then did Spirit recieve a letter from Darl McBride and panic?
So if we take a pic now, using this technique, we might well be able to see the Mars Interdiction Team working on the Spirit Rover?
I'd been hoping that the earlier 2m resolution pics would show a big-ass Dune-style sandworm making its way to the landing site...
8-)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
UT rul0rz
Spirit must have found that elusive caffeine vein detected from earth way back in 1968.
NASA: "Ok Spirit, time for bed."
Rover: "WHAT, ME? SLEEP?!?! BUT I'M NOT TIRED!! OK YOU WANT SOME DATA? I'LL GIVE YOU YOUR GODDAMN DATA! AGGGGGGGH!"
Wait until Mars Express takes a picture of the Rover. Then we know what exactly happened. My guess is that its drill is still stuck in that big stone.
Ahah! If I got my yanker stuck in an embarassing object, I would try to keep it quiet also, even faking amnesia to hide the act. We're on to it now.
Table-ized A.I.
They sure have SCO software aboard.
First I wanted to be a chef. Then I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambitions have continued to grow ever since.
-downgrade from critial to serious
-3 types of memory: random(lost every night), flash(science data, etc), double eprom(program data. harder to write to).
-cripple mode- run without the flash ram
-Sent commands to put spirit into cripple mode. No more resets so far. It can also sleep now.
-Will relay entire contents of flash ram to mars observor over the next day or so. Hopefully that'll give clues as to what happened.
-Since cripple mode means no permenant storage, spirit forgets it's in cripple mode everytime it goes to sleep.
-proabably about 3 weeks until it's back up running to any significant degree.
How brutal is it that the connection from Mars is faster than the dialup-only available in NW Ontario? :-(
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
Debugging the Spirit is SOOO SLOOWW... I hit F10 and it takes an hour to go to the next damn line!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
It's running Windows ME! Nooooooo!
...if a little more of the information was given to the public. There are a lot of very bright, very interested and very talented engineers that would love to contribute to the solution. Some aspects would need to be kept out of the public hands (lest, of course, some kid in the Bronx go joy-riding in Spirit using just some RadioShack spare parts). But the lion's share of the problem could be posted up for the best (dare I say it?) open-source solution to an engineering problem.
Bugzilla for NASA. I guess that's the best way to describe what I'm thinking.
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
I have no experience whatsoever with embedded systems or anything of the sort.
I'm asking not to be cynical, I'm really interested in the pros and cons of using a Wind River system, and don't know anything about it.
I mean, if NASA went with a system that's obviously problematic but so central to everything, I'd start what wondering was going on.
But not being in the field, I can't evaluate it.
So can someone else explain why use Wind River, to give another perspective?
Does Spirit have multiple CPUs/memory like the shuttle? Seems like an obvious thing to do on a multi million $ project with a single point of failure. You could even have two different software teams to avoid bugs. Of course deciding who gets control is tricky. Perhaps alternating cpus everytime there is a reset would ensure a good cpu 50% of the time.
Nah... just sounds like an average college student to me.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
One station wagon traveling at 100 mph can reach mars in 350,000 hours (about 40 years, or about 10^9 seconds). During this time, the spirit would have transmitted about 10^13 bytes at 128 kbps, or 10000 Terabytes. Let's say we could cram about 1000 terabytes into a Custom Cruiser, utilizing the "wayback", so that would mean the spirit is the equivalent of 10 station wagons, give or take 1 order of magnitude... probably a more meaningful comparison would say that the spirit can broadcast at the equivalent of 0.25 stationwagons/year
Not too bad, really!
Warning: author is not responsible for silly arithmetic errors or totally invalid assumptions...
Relying on a single computer that is a few hundred million miles away is, should I dare say? Retarded..
We at NASA are attempting to minimize the amount of retarded engineering we do, but it is a long road, and we are making progress. A report from 1990 showed that as much as 30% of engineering work was severely Retarded, with a whopping 15.1% considered Cretinous, and approximately 3.6% Id10t1c. Since then, we have cut this figures in HALF. 2002 figures showed only 16.8% Retarded work, 6% Cretinous, and Id10t1c lowered below 1%.
We can't do this alone, and we appreciate the insight of posters such as "codepunk" pointing this out to us. As you know, we are very busy, and often forget about things like redundancy and failure cases. Thank you for bringing this retarded decision to our attention. May we be so kind as to extend a job offer to you in our Retardation Quality Asurance department, where I am sure you will make an excellent Retardation Analyst.
So the Mars rover has twice the throughput from Mars to Earth than I have with my dial-up modem from my house to my ISP.
Because the threat of force from the combined u.n. nations wasn't enough to deter the American military superpower. Had the U.N backed up it's veto with threat of force, Saddam would still be suppressing his people.
All this shows is that the good ole boy rich, fat, white guy network is still firmly entrenched, such that "America == Europe, sorta" and so will fail to back up the words with spine. So the U.S. can use it's economic and political might to streamroller them.
This whole situation is more of a show of spinelessness on the part of the world to stand up as one against the U.S., than it is about the U.S., who at least took out a tyrannical regime in the hope of helping the people. Oh, and we had the balls to stand up and take the oil, unlike the French who tried to do in dirty backroom deals.
Awwww, too bad you didn't get the joke. Don't you look silly. No one here is going to call you names like "buttwad" or "retard" because of it, though. They'd just be making themselves look bad. Get it?
Spirit is on fucking Mars and I'm stuck here in the boondocks of Earth and I still only get 56k.
Damn it.
Why is this term starting to pick up the stench of 'fag', 'kike' and 'daygo'?
Maybe because most zealots (atleast Linux zealots) are fags anyways.
Another interesting measure could of course be the amount of data present between Earth and Mars. Incidentally, this would be dependent on the relative positions of the two planets in their orbits, as well as data transfer rate. That could make for some interesting storage capabilities... a storage medium that grows and shrinks over the course of a few years. Hmmm.
Also, there's this interesting question: let's say a data stream of arbitrary length shorter than the quantity defined above is transmitted from Mars towards Earth (or the other way around, but let's stick to M-to-E for now). This is received on Earth at some time delta-T later. Is the data transmitted at time T_r - dT, where T_r is time of reception? If it is, how do you prove it? (Remember, having a computer say "lock confirmed, message commencing" doesn't cut it.)
Anyone got a good definition of teraquads in terms of kilobits?
And for those who don't get it, the above is more of a joke than anything else...
Been modded interesting, insightful and funny. Why does real life have to be so different?
Hello-o? Anybody home?
Don't tell me PCMCIA, because IMHO I can.
Less is more !
Of interest is this one picture, which shows the Spirit Rover landed in an area that is green
and a tip of the hat to the what color is mars debate, with this image comparison
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've always found this forum pretty hetro - such as the recent poll about "Your greatest failing as a geek" having an option of "have girlfried", but not "Sig. other". I have yet to see a post here that is clearly from a [fag | homo | fairy | dyke | lesbo | queen | bi | queer | trans | !hetro]. Let's hear from the queers of /.! (Even if you do happen to be zealots...)
but you have to be willing to fork it over.
The rover's cheap fallback is what, 10 bps? You're doing better than that.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
And it would cost so much just to vet the comments and try to separate the spam from the good stuff that they'd have to sell advertising on the site.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
The flash ram went bad."
Why does this not surprise me? I'd guess that SanDisk put in the low bid for that part.
The flash ram went bad."
Why does this not surprise me? I'd guess that SanDisk put in the low bid for that part.
There's no heart based twin Spirit(s) to synchronize and debug?
What's in a Sig?
What's in a sig?
It sent them a core dump?
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
> but with something as (I'm assuming) well written as their code, doesn't that point to a memory problem?
Well, you seem to be right about the memory problem.
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
From boingboing.net via Stephen Frank:
"Confidential to T-Mobile: NASA is downloading 36 MB TIFFs from Mars and I only get 2 bars of signal on my cell phone inside my house. Please look into upgrading."
The 73 megabytes was 3173913 iterations of
"j00 R 0\/\/nnnn0r3D!!!"
Obviously Digicrime.com strikes again.
Warning:
IE: DON'T GO THERE!
Mozilla:
Turn off java script before going here or your browser will close......
http://www.digicrime.com/mars/
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
With the alternative "cripple mode" boot sequence, NASA was able to pull off about an hour's worth of data off of Spirit that had been acquired before the problem started.
The longer example also contains some punctuation. This is a bit of a clue.
The plaintext is a commercial dead tree book, but there's several web pages with (mostly the same) excepts online. The plaintext is amid most of those web pages.
The hints page also pretty much tells you how to convert via octal.
Having located the known plaintext, it's a case of picking through looking for repeated bits that make up words, snippets of words, etc etc. Having found "the" and "there", for example, you can spot "re" in other bits, and eventually break it into "th", "e", "r", etc etc. Finding "this" lets you break up "th" and "is", and so on. Eventually you can break all the patterns down to single letters.
Obviously you can start at the start, and after some of the bits of punctuation. I put "=" at each of the known "start points", then used perl regex like:
$msg =~ s/=1234/th=/g;
(In other words "if 1234 occurs at a known start-point, replace with "th" and move on the known start-point.)
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Now I've got a bit of perl that converts the long example code into the (found) plaintext. I've just got to manually transcribe the "-" and "l" from the 'orrible fuzzy images (which is apparently the worst bit :-( ), guess at which way up they're supposed to be, and run them through the same perl. If there's any unparsed letters in it, I'll have to make a good guess.
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
It's an absolutely splendid message, had me ROTFL. Well worth the effort! Thanks planetary society!
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
Wow...never thought about stuff like that.
I wonder if this same algorithms used can apply to image enhancement from spy satellites (or if the distortion used is from something different). That'd make for scarily good detail.
Second of all, one wonders what would happen if there were two satellites that could orbit at right angles to each other, thus getting downtrack resolution in both directions (though one would obviously have to be a bit time-delayed.
May we never see th
with the latency you'd never be able to game! ;-)
Quack, quack.
OK, so NASA is sending radio signals to Spirit (and Opportunity), and the rovers are sending radio signals back. I assume these are not tight-beam transmissions, and that they can be picked up by a properly-tuned homebuilt reciever. The question is, are NASA and the rovers using signed, encrypted data channels? If so, are they using known cryptosystems and existing protocols, or did they make some up ad hoc, just for the rovers? For their sake, I hope so. Technically, anyone with a transceiver could intercept and decode the transmissions, and taint or falsify the communications. Actually, this is a worry with any wireless communication scheme, but in this case at least no one can reverse-engineer the communication systems. One would either have to get to Mars or break into NASA's control center... both of which are unrealistic and unlikely. But it is an issue to be considered, ne?
"Beware of strangers bearing GIFs"