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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.
A diagnostic is what runs when nothing else will.
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?
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
Has anyone cracked this yet?
-bk.
Nasa systems that involve human life are highly redundant. I remember a lecture by a NASA engineer about systems on the Shuttle. There are *seven* redundant computers which calculate data. That data requires identical answers from four to be accepted.
:-)
On Spirit, power is an issue. More CPUs == more power drain.
Furthermore, I remember the folks initially speculating that something was wrong with the power system. I stopped following it, but it said that this transmission was composed of power subsystem diagnostic data. Could be it's a response requested earlier that it didn't have enough juice to send, in which case more CPUs would have actually exacerbated the problem.
May we never see th
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Something like 2/3 of NASA's recent missions have failed in some way or another. 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?
In some ways, there is an air of arrogance in everything NASA does, from their press conferences to their marketing agreements. We have dead shuttle astronauts being transformed into "national heroes," even though their demise wasn't the result of any heroic sacrifices on their part, but rather a materials and systems failure scenario that NASA failed to handle properly. We have Spirit as the "little train that could," sending back waves of photographs of rocks that NASA engineers have actually named. Does the naming of rocks somehow bring NASA's mission closer to the unwashed masses who relate better to Beanie Babies than to the stark facts of reality?
Harsh as it sounds, NASA is reaping what they sow: A string of hardware and software failures that is serving as a backdrop to newly-mandated initiatives by Bush to send miners to the moon and astronauts to Mars. Yet NASA can't even seem to get a remote-control buggy to work correctly. The mind just reels at the catastrophes that await us between now and 2015 should NASA continue down this road of inept management and hardware/software designs insufficiently tested against the harsh envrions of space. As geeks, we owe it not only to ourselves but to the non-geek public to recognize these failures as serious shortcomings in the NASA culture. We must resist the temptation to blindly set NASA on a pedestal in the name of scientific achievement without first critically analyzing their failures.
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/
You know, it occurs to me that maybe instead of having an interactive rover with a billion complicated subsystems and spectrometers and cameras... it might be a good idea to launch a package full of smaller autonomous devices carrying different instrumentation... So you'd have a base that lands on mars, opens up (like the rover bases do) and releases 20 or 30 "dumb robots" on treads or big balloon tires(I'm thinking each the size of a big R/C car), some of which would have cameras, the rest instrumentation of whatever sort.. All of the little slaves would move around randomly or according to some simple program (either mechanical or software) and relay collected information to the base, which would transmit it to earth... Some of the camera bots would be designed to just move as far as possible and take as many pictures as possible... others would just do instrumental analyses of whatever they happen to bump into or land on... You wouldn't know exactly what the instruments were looking at but you'd probably be able to collect a sizable amount of data on a particular landing region; know what minerals are present, etc. You wouldn't know that pyramid shaped rock 12B contains olivine but you'd know olivine was present.