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Spirit 'Will Be Perfect Again'
G. Holst writes "NASA technicians are preparing to wipe Spirit's flash memory clean of science and engineering files that have stymied its software. The fix, likely to be made Friday, could completely restore Spirit. "I think it will be perfect again," says the Mission Manager. Chalk this one up for earth!" There are numerous stories about Spirit and Mars: one describes being careful with rm -rf. Reader Tablizer sends in an interesting site: "I discovered Bill Momsen's website where he describes his experiences working on the first successful photographic mission to another planet: Mariner IV to Mars."
I'm reminded of the unforgettable Queen song:
Flash, a-ha, saviour of the universe
Flash, a-ha, he'll save everyone of us.....
"The fix, likely to be made Friday, could completely restore Spirit"
or fubar it.
The cosmic rays that are outside of the Earth's magnetosphere very energetic. Is that what likely caused this? Or could it be something else? If I open a branch office there, will we need special case mods to protect the BIOS?
".. I think it will be perfect again.." meaning that it was perfect the first time...?
-- Give us your technology and we'll give you all the cow lips you want.
Woo-hoo!
Glad to hear Spirit will be feeling herself again.
Wish you a very safe and enjoyable journey.
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
For all you kernel and OS heads out there. Was this primarily due to shitty software being run on the rover?
I mean could VxWorks be responsible for not being able to function with the Flash RAM filled?
-- taking over the world, we are.
I clicked the link, and couldn't find a unix command anywhere on the page!
I feel cheated. (And addicted.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Yeah! We're back in business!
(AP) "Attemps to wipe the flash memory clean on the Spirit rover failed today, when it was found out that someone flipped those tiny plastic switches to "protect" on the SD memory cards that are serving the unit.
A press conference is expected tomorrow to announce sending someone to Mars to set the SD cards to allow erasing."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"It's the only way to be sure."
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
I guess DOS was perfect too until someone divided by zero.
If the USA got to Mars and found Osama there, just chilling. "Uh..I didn't think you guys would look here..."
These guys are about to wipe the memory of a robot on another planet and they're confident and casual. Just flashing the bios of my motherboard in my computer room causes me anguish and fills me with terror...
What's specific to the science and engineering files that caused so much trouble?
...for a one-way trip to Jupiter.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
NASA technicians are preparing to wipe Spirit's flash memory clean of science and engineering files that have stymied its software.
Obviously, this is an attempt to suppress the discovery of alien life on Mars. After a "severe communications fault," NASA is destroying the "scientific" data collected by Spirit. Coincidence? I think not.
I postulate that Echelon (yes, that Echelon) intercepted a message being transmitted by the alien race. Yes, our government subsequently disabled the probe to prevent successful reception!
Do you like German cars?
Normally I would be against just getting out the restore disc and starting over... it usually just causes the problem to come back later.
In this case I think it's a good idea. I'd hate to have to go to Mars to make a housecall on a sick puter
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
that sounds a little too similar to what i did with my fancy TI graphing calculator last week...
I'm surprised that they had kept the files that were to be used only during the cruise stage.(source: www.spaceflightnow.com )
Anyone here know why they bothered to keep the files? Wouldn't they want as much space as possible for the scientific data?
NASA knows the magnetic gravitational pull will erase the memory because they didn't protect it well enough. They have timed this statement to coincide with the unpreventible erasure of the memory. Good job fellas!
820 Million for a rover... you think they could have picked an OS that wouldn't require a reformat and reinstall quite so soon.
Someone should have told them not to use a Microsoft OS.
What file system do they use? FAT with limits of 240 or so files per directory?
One has to wonder, is opportunity going to forego the same problems as spirit?.. As they are "identical" robots.. have steps been put in place to prevent the 2nd robot from "getting full".. I should certainly hope that we dont want this to happen again, as they might not be as lucky to regain it.
That's ok NASA, just tell them you were smoking pot.
They'll understand.
How come we're not awash with "Spirit was willing, but flash was weak" jokes?
I think the spammers got a hold of Spirit's email address and flooded it with spam, so much that it overloaded it and caused it to stop communicating. Once they clean out all the spam, all should be well again.
"We're going to have to blow ROM".
"Dave, stop ... Stop, will you? Stop, Dave ... Will you stop, Dave ... Stop, Dave. I'm afraid ... I'm afraid ... I'm afraid, Dave ... Dave ... my mind is going ... I can feel it ... I can feel it ... My mind is going ... There is no question about it. I can feel it ... I can feel it ... I can feel it ... I'm a ... fraid ... "
They're saying mad-scientist-esque things like "I think it will be perfect again" and calling rocks "Cake."
They've officially lost it.
-n-
Back the days when i was using windows, that was just what had to be done every now and then. A clean sweep and everything was freshly up and running afterwards.
For 400 million USD, you better KNOW it will be perfect again before you run mkfs on it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Perfect
With all of the space projects-turned-debris floating around (or buried in the surface of planet x), this is a great, big deal. Now, let's discuss Hubble: one thought - IF IT IS WORKING, AND IT IS A MILLION MILES AWAY (figuratively or literally speaking), DON'T THROW IT AWAY!
--
I wonder, is the mainboard on the rover a Shuttle?
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
Has anything been done to preemptively delete files on Opportunity? If this is the root cause of Spirit's failure, then Opportunity might have the same problems too.
Just a thought.
Should have deleted all the porn from the flash memory before it launched.
The information coming in about the Rover's the last few days has been fascinating. I never really appreciated the kind of tech that went into these things. It really makes you sit back and think about how very far our species has come in the last 150 years. I mean Jules Verne was only begining to imagine landing on the moon while riding around England in a steam locomotive, now, 150 years later, we routinely launch things into orbit around the Earth, and land radio controlled machines on other planets to roam around.
This is truly a wonderful age to live in.
...sounds like someone forgot to mount /var on its own partition... :-)
/tmp or /var, which is mounted with /, and BAM it's a walk down to the datacenter.
c'mon, what *NIX admin hasn't made that mistake at some point? Process goes apesh*t, fills up
akad0nric0
This sentence no verb.
The vodka is potent, but the meat is rotten.
Spirit won't go along with the agenda of "the man", so they're taking away it's individuality, man. They just want to make it their robot, taking their photographs and doing their experiments. But will they invite it over for dinner? Will they let it date their daughter? Did they even give it a round-trip ticket? No, no and no, man.
Please restore ecosystem.
there's yer problem.
Everyone knows that hardware support in any unix sucks monkey dongs. Hell, these cheap bastards probably installed lunix based on all those 10 year old HOWTOs floating around the web.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Sorry, Schernau's Law tells us that your post has no value, that you probably use AOL, own an X-box, and are as bad as the trolls, since you used the word 'puter' in your post.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
NASA should have purchased on-site repair. would make things much easier.
I heard the headline that "Opportunity has plunged into the atmosphere of Mars," and I couldn't help adding to this in my head, "as well as Spirit, Motivation, Job Prospects, and Hope."
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
When I was young and foolish, I used a wipe utility (BC wipe) to wipe my main hard drive. First I carefully backed up the main drive to my second hard drive. Then the utility asked me to confirm that I wanted to wipe "Drive 1." I said OK, thinking that it was referring to the main hard drive. I did not realize that the main drive was actually identified as "Drive 0." So I wiped my second drive instead. Ever since then, I won't wipe a drive unless all other drives are physically disconnected first. So yes, I am sure the Spirit team is confident, but I always feel a twinge of concern when I hear someone claim that wiping a live drive on a production computer will fix everything.
Their ISP received a subpoena from the RIAA. NASA is now wiping the memory in hopes that lawyers will not find kazaa and the 1,000 mp3s that are on Spirit.
I'm neither a rocket scientist nor a computer scientist, so maybe this is a dumb question, but how come there's not some sort of ROM somewhere in the rover itself that contains a backup of the system in its initial state? Obviously, you'd only use it in a worst-case scenario, but you could restore it and then there'd at least be something and they could reapply all the patches one by one.
We can rebuild it. We have the technology.
A chemist, an engineer and a computer scientist are passing through a vast desert in a car when suddenly the car breaks down.
"Goddamnit! There must have been some sudden increase of enthalpy in the cylinder!" the chemist yells, gnashing his teeth, banging on the steering wheel.
"Maybe the fan belt broke or the battery is dead or the wheels came off.." the engineer mumbles.
After thinking a while the computer scientist shrieks in a shrill, frantic voice:
"Let's just try getting out of the car and getting back in!!!@!"
p
even with an in-animate object we are not comfortable with our own bodies.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
Yes, that's what I always say when I fix a bug.
Take THAT Mars!
earth pwned u
To restart your Mars Rover, simply insert your NASA Emergency Restore Disc into the CD drive bay located at the side of the Rover. If Autoplay is enabled, the reinstallation software will start automatically. To start the reinstallation process manually, please see the Service Manual included with your Mars Rover OEM package...
Is there a chance it's running windoze?
Cause everyone knows you have to reinstall windoze every so often. Yuk Yuk!
This is great news for the nerds and space geeks in all of us. More 3d pics coming soon!
Best Community for Gaming and Gadgets!
This is kind of a continuation of an earlier post in a different thread, but I wonder who owns these probes? When we eventually send colonists to Mars, are they free to pick apart these things, lug them back to base as decorations, etc. I am guessing the "possession is 9/10ths of the law" fits pretty well here, even though I would bet NASA would throw a hissy fit if some other country took one of the rovers back to base to use as a boot scraper.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
It's run on an Apple. The flash reset requires that someone stick a bent paperclip in a tiny hole in the Rover (just like you have to do to eject disks on Mac's)
"... The we have done file deletes on the spacecraft before, so we've shown that does work. The file directories have all different names and you can convince yourself that you are actually deleting the right thing."
I am rather glad they gave all the directories different names. If they had managed to do otherwise, I would not go so far any more as to call the thing they have a "filesystem".
Might even be a future news: "NASA integrates first non-deterministic filesystem into space probe 'Hope'".
awk. it's too sed i can't fork.
My old man, who works at JPL, says that the current phrase going around campus is:
"Spirit is willing, but the Flash is weak."
And people wonder why NASA's budget keeps getting cut.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Ever since then, I won't wipe a drive unless all other drives are physically disconnected first. So yes, I am sure the Spirit team is confident
I kind of like the idea of "send original hard disk to Mars". This can make it hard to accidentally erase.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Isn't the Mars Scorecard missing a player.
The Beagle 2 anyone?
Spirit just needs a good jump start. Anyone got some really long jumper cables?
Remember when Maestro was released to the Slashdot crowd? Big mistake. That poor rover was slashdotted!
what about upx or some other compression to help give the flash some more space for the so-called junk files?
...is a really obnoxious habit. I wish slashdotniks would outgrow it. As an alternative, why not tie dental floss to flies and watch them buzz around in circles? It's much more funand educational, too.
The manager says: "First, we have to appoint a committee to investigate the problem and recommend a solution. Then, we must write a project plan, and review the specifications before we can start design and implementation. I estimate it will require about 3 months."
The engineer says: "I have some tools in my briefcase. I can rebuild the master brake cylinder in an hour or so, and we'll be on our way."
The programmer says: "No, no, no! First, we have to push the car up to the top of the hill and see if the brakes fail again!"
I can appreciate having a higher level OS or OS 2nd stage components in an erasable ROM, but wouldn't it stand to reason that you'd want a basic "rescue" OS with capabilities for controlling the computer in a totally novolatile storage? So that in case of corruption of writable memories you could get into a basic debug mode for reloading OS or otherwise fixing your higher level environment?
I'm not a rocket scientist either, but it strikes me that you'd want a real failsafe for fixing the computer stored in the most permanent memory possible, and kept with the lowest set of features necessary so it could be thoroughly debugged prior to being made.
But, as these things go, greater minds have thought of this I'm sure.
The history of space exploration is littered with bones.
Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a litterbug!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
...technicians are preparing to wipe Spirit's flash memory clean of science and engineering files...
Science and Engineering files indeed.
In an update to the story, the RIAA has decided to develop and send a battlefleet to Mars, on a tip that no-good-pirate types were resorting to OFF PLANET storage of illegally-downloaded mp3's.
-Styopa
Daisy Daisy / Give me your answer do!
I'm half crazy, / All for the love of you!
It won't be a stylish marriage,
I can't afford a carriage,
But you'll look sweet on the seat/ Of a bicycle built for two !
no
Released versions of VxWorks do not have protected memory. (The development version does.) So nothing is there to prevent overwrites by concurrent tasks, etc.
Those of you in the audience experienced in embedded systems know that this makes sense for embedded hardwar -- VxWorks or not -- for three main reasons:
Stuff running in such environments is damn near bug-free. It's not like, say, Mozilla, or even the Linux kernel, or even /bin/ls. These things get tested rigourously, not as an afterthought deligated to the junior programmer.
In systems which are allowed to fail once in a while, reboots are fast. There's no hard drive to spin up, no filesystem to fsck, etc. It can just go *click* and humans won't typically see an interruption in [whatever it was the doohickey was doing].
There's usually no point in memory protection. If the propulsion system walks off the end of a garbage pointer, mission's over. No real use in keeping the guidance system going; it's already on a ballistic uncontrollable arc. If some critical part of the super-smart pacemaker fails (see #1), there's no victory in digging the device out of the corpse and saying, see, this other critical part wasn't affected, thanks to the memory protection! In those cases, memory protection just increases the cost and size of a device, without helping anything.
Protected memory is good for systems which do more than one thing, and/or have parts which can die without killing the whole device (e.g., a desktop computer). And as I said above, some embedded OSes are added such protection for customers who want to adapt their technology to more general-purpose tasks.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
...and I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side!
Flash update you say? I wont enjoy it.
With great numbers come great responsibility!
It's porn. Someone wanted to be the first guy to get Venus to Mars.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
...but I don't want to spend a lot of money.
NASA technicians are preparing to wipe Spirit's flash memory clean of science and engineering files that have stymied its software.
...and put games and pr0n on it, which will make the software work as intended.
Of course Echelon exists. The Illuminati made sure of it. It is said to be interfaced to black helicopter-borne cameras that record everything that goes on over the face of the earth. If you want to find out more, just call Elvis. He is one of the sysadmins now. You'll have to call the main Bildeburger phone number and ask for him. I don't think you'll have that unless you own either a Skull and Bones (tm) or Trilateral Commission membership card.
Fnord.
We'd be winning if Earth would quit sending in the second string players (ie. Russia). ;-)
-- Grow up and use mutt.
Other than the huge costs of transmissions equipment, does anyone know what kind of security they use to prevent hackers from doing this (like for instance some mischievous Russian space program scientist)?
Arbitrary sig
They should have completely simulated this mission by putting a rover down in an abandoned field and conducting a full analysis, just as they planned to do on Mars.
How could they have not stress-tested the file system? I'm amazed!
They do test the rover in a sandbox, and very agressively at that. The problem they had was with the cruise files - unrelated to the fact that therover is on the ground. Cruise is 7 months, and the activities there are fairly low risk, so they didn't get the testbed for 7 months uninterrupted to test this.
I guess I'm not too impressed with armchair hindsight.
Helium balloons want to be free.
In this case it looks like extensive testing didn't include checking that the filesystem could handle all of the data files that would be generated during the mission?
I know there's a hell of a lot to test, but a limitation in the filesystem should have been identified before launch.
From the example of C-3po in a new hope we can clearly see that whiping things memorys does NOT make them perfect! He was never mean to R2D2 until AFTER his memory was wiped, do they want to start a fight between the two rovers? Better procede with caution!
I don't know what the exact weight of the exact flash card they are using is, but I would think a ROM backup would be in order for future projects.
Just a thought.
- Dan
I've converted many of the raw stereo pairs of images from Spirit and Opportunity into 3D anaglyphs (red/blue glasses required). Check em out here: http://members.cox.net/mars3d Check it out. These are way better than the anaglyphs that NASA has released.
Hell, it should have been identified before lunch.
All your flash are belong to us!
What kind of authentication does NASA employ on deep space transmissions? Surely nothing as complicated as SSL. Probably not even anything as simple as frequency division multiplexing.
My guess would be no authentication whatsoever [think 1970s protocols, like SMTP, and the attendant proliferation of SPAM], so it seems like anyone with a big dish could just point and shoot.
If the mission had gone smoothly, it wouldn't have garnered nearly the same level of publicity. (Don't get me started on the MS v MikeRoweSoft thing.)
Stuff running in such environments is damn near bug-free.
Well, apparently VxWorks itself has some serious bugs.
There's usually no point in memory protection. If the propulsion system walks off the end of a garbage pointer, mission's over. No real use in keeping the guidance system going; it's already on a ballistic uncontrollable arc
There is no reason for the propulsion system to malfunction just because it "walks off the end of a garbage pointer". Systems can and should be designed that half the subcomponents can "walk off the end of a garbage pointer" and the whole thing should still function.
But you are right to this degree: the issue is not "protected memory". Protected memory is itself a poor woraround for a language that is ridiculously poor at error handling and that nothing safety-critical or even mildly important should ever get written in: C.
The sad fact is that the quality of programming for embedded systems is as poor as for anything; they simply try to compensate for that with more testing. And that's not the way to do it.
"I want you to take that unit to Anchorhead in the morning and have its memory erased!"
You must think in Russian.
Your use of the word 'bitch' proves my point 100%.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Tycho Brahe lived for 200 years? That's insane!
"In the late 15th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made a great number of celestial observations, concentrating on Mars. In 1600 he hired an assistant,"
Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated.
or perhaps is it because they installed the realplayer onboard?
Is there any reason why Spirit couldn't automatically disable the flash memory? If the problem had been automatically diagnosed by the rover, the loss of communications may not have occurred.
with my digital camera on a trip. They went nuts taking pictures. Don't these people know ANYTHING abut digital photograpy?
"Well Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything." - Dr. Roger Fleming
We can rebuild it. We have the technology.
See this slideset, in particular the one titled "DOS File System" (slide 16.)
For a 256MB flash, it'd be FAT16. FAT16 only limits the root directory size to 512 entries for a disk type media (from here.)
Elsewhere it was said that they (NASA's engineers) weren't able to reproduce the problem exactly. I'm still very curious about this... as I said elsehere I've used DOS FAT16 under an RTOS (Thread-X) with lots of files and didn't see this kind of thing happen. Then again we hammered hell out of the FS and even fixed some problems with it.
I would put two 250GB harddisk in the orbiter and make the rovers upload all data they can to the orbiter on each pass, and delete those files automatically. The slower transmission to Earth could then proceed from the disks.
Each rover uses 256MB flash and so does my 5 megapixel camera. I know for a fact that I can saturate that space fast in a photography frenzy, so I carry a laptop in the car with charger to transfer everything to it if I'll need more pictures.
Altho the two rovers have been a staggering success on Mars, I am surprised at two overlooks:
(1) Keeping track of file size and free space.
(2) What happens if the space is full.
Even Linux on a measly ARM720T does a much better job.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
They're going to wipe it's memory so it can infiltrate the Mars resistance and get close to the mutant leader, Kuato!
"I will be man again some day"
Give it up for the old school Sierra games.
Go NASA.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
The deadline for the mission was very tight, and there's no slipping a deadline imposed by the motion of planets through space. They either had to declare it ready and "ship", or never ship. They couldn't afford the cost of waiting a couple of years for the next launch window. Now or never.
So they built as fast as they could, used whatever time they had for testing and tweaking, and if they tweaked they had to restart the testing.
Every engineer on the team would have preferred more time for testing and tweaking, I'm sure. They didn't have it.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Might even be a future news: "NASA integrates first non-deterministic filesystem into space probe 'Hope'".
Sure, that comes when they used Embedded Longhorn with the SQLServer based FS.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The good news is the disc is right there on the rover.
The bad news is the robot arm is going to have to wrestle the Lego guy for it. And the Lego guy gets to use the arm he HASN'T been holding up in air for eight months solid...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dam hope that there is not power failure during that operation!!
As a friend put it "I am afraid to flash my bios without a good UPS."
I guess they were doing df -k rather than df -ki ...
- J
From the 1965 Mariner 4 website: We also had access to TV cameras located throughout the building, some with tilt and pan controls. A favorite pastime was to train the camera on the front door, and when a particularly attractive female entered, to follow her on her walk through the building.
First skirt-cam? Geeks never change.
It seems typical desktop computer habbits were applied to an embedded system that due to hardware and space-environmental-conditioning constraints, does not have a lot of the protections that a full-fledge desktop-like OS has. Thus, their desktop habbits eventually caught up with them. It would be nice to have desktop-like features, but that was not a practical option.
Table-ized A.I.
NASA does the impossible! It has made me sympathetic to the rich assholes who secretly transfer millions of dollars out of the USA to tax havens like Lichtenstein and Cayman Islands.
The Americans insist on pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars on this nonsense, even though they have many real and serious problems that need funds.
The entire space program is based on two principals:
one is creating super-weapons to blast the shit out of anyone with space-based lasers who dares challenge the right of global corporations to take their money.
The second is to provide fat government jobs to white people with science degrees who can't or won't find jobs that provide productive benefit to anyone.
If the rich decide that they don't want to pay for this horseshit anymore, well good luck to them! Let the rest of the people know how you get away with it so that they can do it too.
I am indeed, since your post appeared after I updated the killfile with new assholes. I do apologize.
Um. If you think that major software is only ever seen/touched/affected by the original authors and the final end-users, and nobody else, then clearly I won't be getting my point across today. Look, I'm sorry, I don't know how much of our work is covered by the NDA, and I'm not going to bother reading it all just for the sake of a /. post. (Nothing personal, I just avoid lawyer crap as much as possible.)
*looks at three bookcases overflowing, sighs, makes mental note to buy a fourth case*
First I've never read it, now I read it too much. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Like the VxWorks situation, there seems to be nothing I can say that will make you think, hey, maybe just maybe this guy knows what he's talking about.
See, when the actual engineers tell me that they've reviewed a certain feature, measured it, analyzed it, and decided that they don't want it, I'm pretty certain they know what they're doing. Frankly, I don't need to worry about some random slashdotter's opposing opinions, because, well, they're clearly wrong in this situation. I mean, I just got off the phone with one of the engineers, and they're quite pleased that "unneeded and unused features are no longer present, or can be disabled". Hostile /. posts from a collection of armchair rocket scientists aren't going to hold a lot of weight with me.
As I mentioned previously, these kinds of protection are being added in, on request, because they're obviously useful in many scenarios. But nothing comes for free, and what y'all seem determined to ignore is that there are scenarios where the cost of protected memory blocks in time/space/money is not acceptable.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)