Slashdot Mirror
Mars Landers - Opportunity, Bedrock, Aerosmith?
Iphtashu Fitz writes "As was reported last week, the first Mars rover Spirit had some communications problems that the folks at the JPL have finally managed to trace to problems with its flash memory. Reuters is reporting that Opportunity seems to be having some power-related problems, too. It appears a faulty thermostat is turning a heater on overnight without being told to do so. While NASA isn't concerned about the rover overheating, they're exploring the long-term effects of continued power drain on the second rover." The article also notes: "The first three-dimensional, panoramic images beamed back from Opportunity showed an intriguing outcrop of exposed bedrock" - there's now a color version of the same image. Finally, lightwaveman points to the Spaceflight Now status page regarding new priorities for the Mars mission: "The airing of today's Mars rover news conference is being delayed on NASA TV to show the band Aerosmith touring International Space Station Mission Control at Houston's Johnson Space Center."
Seriously though, it's been a pretty good week for NASA so far, with Opportunity landing safely and Spirit slowly coming back to health.
My question is: When they locate a fix for Spirit, will they apply it to Opportunity as well? Are the two really identical, and if so wouldn't Opportunity run the risk of the same sort of major nervous breakdown that Spirit had? Or do they plan on leaving well enough alone?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Why doesn't NASA Open Source this rover code? Not for the outside world to contribute to the development, but for review. The collective intelligence of the open source community could certainly provide productive and insightful reviews. Perhaps problems such as file management could be avoided. At the very least the open souce community would be able to document weak points in the design that could be improved or avoided in production use.
Its not like this is proprietary, for-profit code. I helped paid for it. Its for the good of all mankind.
If nothing else, I would love the chance to learn something from NASA. The rover code might be as beautiful as the images coming back (or not!).
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.