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Mars Rover Spirit Back Online

Posted by timothy on from the expensive-vacation dept.

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."

1 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Monday morning quarterback by GGardner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If I was sending an embedded control computer to another planet, I would have chosen an OS with memory protection, not VxWorks. VxWorks is like DOS, and early versions of Windows, where one pointer problem in one task can corrupt the whole system. Sure, we don't know that's the problem now, but it would be nice to know for sure that it wasn't.