Mars Rover Spirit Back Online

Skyshadow writes "Just in time for the arrival of its twin, the Spirit Mars Rover is back in working order. Programmers at the JPL have traced the problem to the rover's flash RAM, which it uses to maintain its filesystems. They are using a ramdisk in the rover's RAM to bypass the bad flash memory, and are working on a workaround for the bad flash. Good news, but the rover is still potentially weeks away from full operational status."

Comments

Re:Monday morning quarterback

[mnmn]

I will never understand why Linux and NetBSD are currently looked down upon in the embedded corporations currently. QNX does a great job too, but of these four, why WxWorks?

I'm sure the NASA engineers have computers at home, mostly running either Windows 98, 2000 or XP. They should know the way a crash in Windows 98 brings the whole system down and Windows 2000 doesnt always do that. I wouldnt count on them to have had lots of experience with BSD or Linux because they didnt use that.

I think just like that NASA's pathfinder sailplane, these rovers should have at least 2 computers on board with each CPU+OS constantly checking the state of the other and being able to take over. Perhaps just building in a really smart BIOS like they did is a cleaner solution.