A First Look At Meridiani Planum

loconet writes "After Opportunity 's successful landing on mars , NASA has recieved the first images showing the landing site revealing a surreal, dark landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars. The terrain is darker than at any previous Mars landing site and has the first accessible bedrock outcropping ever seen on Mars. The outcropping immediately became a candidate target for the rover to visit and examine up close."

Comments

IIRC...

[criordan]

IIRC 'planum' is Latin for 'plain', which Meridiani Planum certainly looks to be from those pictures. Wouldn't it have been more worthwhile to drop this rover near some mountains, or like Spirit, in a crater? Seems like there would be more geologically important sites to investigate in those types of terrain. Also, shouldn't the heat shield make a crater of its own? After it seperated it just slammed into Mars without any kind of parachute. Is it close enough to reach and would it be worth investigated the hole it's impact created?

Corrupted flash file system?

[Dan East]

Trying to put 2 and 2 together, it sounds like the file system on the flash storage was corrupted by software. That could prevent the system from properly accessing the drive, prompting an endless cycle of reboots.

Two things about that bothers me.

Why would the OS / driver allow software to corrupt the filesystem?

If the system can function without the flash memory ("cripple mode"), then why couldn't the system properly identify (or at least report) the failure, instead of going into an endless loop of reboots?

Finally, if it were a software problem, shouldn't they be able to play back the exact sequence of commands to a duplicate machine at JPL and reproduce the problem?

Dan East