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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."
They signed up for Mars Online with 3000 free hours. What they didn't realize was that the free 3000 hours only applied to the first month of service. Once they paid their MOL bill, they got hooked back up. All the probes friends on Mars use MOL!
They should boot faster, using linux. Then they'd only be ten seconds away :-)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
/riff/Move over Rover, let the ramdisk take over!/riff/
Wonder wehre they got they flash ram from?
--
I think they should return the bad flash part to where they got it and exchange it for a new part... although getting the memory back to the store by the 30 day warranty might be a little difficult.
I hope they bought the extended warranty.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
it was their AOL bill that wasn't paid? hmmmm...
Linux with kernel panic...
MadPenguin.org
If I understand this properly, they've got a damaged filesystem on the flash RAM. Not really a big problem, you just have to send someone over to the console to boot it up in single-user mode and run fsck. ... oh yeah, sending someone over to the console is a little bit difficult here. :)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Engineer 1: Ho-hum.. Little bit of ... whatever it is, 'ere... Hand me that thingamajig, will you?
Engineer 2: Yah, sure... Hey, remember that employee last month who got laid of within a week?
Engineer 1: Who? Vincent?
Engineer 2: Yeah, Vinnie... With the Italian accent?
Engineer 1: Yeah, him. What about the guy?
Engineer 2: Well, he has this offer on cheap RAM we just CAN'T resist!
Engineer 1: Really now? But-
Engineer 2: Look, our budget is already comparable to social welfare. We need to save some loot.
Engineer 1: Fair enough, buy the crap and hand me the other twisty-turny thingy over there? I need to screw on this name tag reading... "Spirit"?
Engineer 2: Look, it's either that or my wife's name.
Hate me!
It's all good until tech support says, "So... Do you have a boot disk?" :-)
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
I thought I got it rather spot on. :^P (I guess that makes me the millionth monkey?)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I mean like beagle isnt using its flashram anymore, just go and jack some off it. While your at it TAG the Beagle with some PRO-US graffiti :) hell maybe its got nicer rims too
Seriously, can you imagine the first manned expiditon seeing the Beagle Jacked up, tagged , up on little martian cinderblocks, All that and we already got a head start on building martian cities
They should stick with purple next time.
...and it's amazing NASA could press it at the right time from 124 million miles away (1.3 AU). Although I wonder how many times NASA did have to press it before they got the timing right -- we only know about the success :-)
I have had some tough calls in my time but I have never had to walk a robot 283 million miles away through brain surgery. Man I am glad I did not get that call. This is going to blow there call averages all to hell. I raise a cup of Joe to you, Rover Help Desk man.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
This is the last image received prior to the recent issues with Spirit...
I remember in the last thread about the rover, someone opined that it was bad memory, then proceeded to give a half dozen reasons why. Totally nailed it.
Yeah, in the future NASA should just submit an Ask Slashdot whenever something goes wrong..
where the russian cosmonaut says "American components, Russian components. They're all made in Taiwan!"
IANANE (I am not a NASA engineer), but.....
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
> but really should have triple redundant systems.
I laugh at your puny triple redundant systems!! They should have QUADRUPLE redundant systems!!!
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
The Spirit is willing, but the flash is weak.
(Posted by Jane Slee and John Stracke in separate usenet postings.)
They didn't use Windows CE. Remember the diplomat months back that got locked in his 7 series BMW because of a computer crash? :)
99% of everything posted here is INANE to start with...
Of course I joke... heh. Mostly because of my past jobs working tech support, and the guy sitting next to me one time who tried to get a customer to type "a colon space setup dot exe" for about 5 minutes until I was off my call, heard what he was doing, and slapped him silly.
:-)
:-)
Well, okay, I didn't slap him, but I wanted to. Badly.
But on your response -- that works. I mean, if you're doing something that you could just about do on another planet, it should count. Maybe not so glorious, but still.
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
I can only smile as I recall the heady days of the PC revolution. All the ancient Big Iron sealed away in a hermetically sealed room, and all the expensive and unapproachable priesthood that tended and worshipped the Iron, would be sent packing. The whole shebang replaced by inexpensive PC's controlled by the user, O glorious day! All the expense and complexity, gone!
Snicker. Meet the new iron, same as the old iron.
This is like a reality tv show, I love Nasa Tv!
With the exception that this is actually real...
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Now let's all sing the company song...
:w
"Oh, say can you see..."
Opportunity will most likely have the same problem since they are twin brothers and had an identical build process.
I quote from my post a couple of days ago:
Parent: So even if Spirit gives up the ghost, her kin can carry on the flame (albeit in a less interesting location).
Me: Not if the problem is due to a design fault. That's the drawback of sending multiple identical probes: if one is intrinsically fucked, they all are.
I now bask, contented, in the glow of my own brilliance....
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
A little too much grandstanding though.
I've noticed that a few people stand facing the cameras a lot, gesticulating wildly as if talking about something important.
I also saw one guy go from reading a magazine and sipping a martini to furiously typing away at a keyboard as the camera panned across the room!
How hard is that, really?
/. posters solve all the world's problems in a few snide lines of comment, despite rarely leaving their little veal-fattening pens or even RTFA. Fixing a software glitch a few million miles away is child's play in THIS neighborhood, my friend.
Thousands of
-Styopa