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Spirit 'Will Be Perfect Again'

Posted by michael on from the we-get-signal-main-screen-turn-on dept.

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."

15 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. My question by aliens · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:My question by Docrates · · Score: 4, Interesting

      well, the way I understand it is this: remember how in old DOS (and other OS's) you had to set the number of files open?

      files=30

      well, that basically told the OS how many files it was going to have to handle at any given time.

      Well, in the case of Spirit, it's not that they were short on flash or RAM, it's that the portion of RAM used to handle the files in flash when the flash filesystem is mounted grew unexpectedly for some reason (kinda like the frames in conventional memory you used to access extended memory in DOS). They think the problem was that this portion of RAM used to handle Flash files was not big enough for the amount of files they had in the flash (including files from 6-7 months in transit and a couple of days on the ground in mars).

      Soooo, a quick (ok, maybe not so quick) rewrite of the routines in the OS for this flash-files-handling-RAM-portion should do the trick.

      Bottom line, it WAS a bug that could only surface with thousands of files in flash, which is something they didn't try on the ground.

      --

      There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
  2. Courageous engineers! by EulerX07 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  3. Early Spring Cleaning? by Wiser87 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  4. Re:Any theories on what caused the corruption? by Wiser87 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Actually, it looks like it wasn't a case with the flash memory being corrupted, but rather it having to many files...

    "We also yesterday completed a scan of the flash memory. This provided us with some important diagnostic information. We are now able to tell that when we mount the flash memory, it does in fact take a lot of the system RAM in the process. In fact, more system RAM than is available. So that's helping confirm the theory we had that the reason the restarts were hanging up was because we were running out of memory when we are trying to mount the flash memory.
  5. Mars Rover by Fenis-Wolf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  6. Re:What Filesystem? by morcheeba · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wrote some demo fibre channel block-device drivers for vxWorks a few years ago, and I found that VxWorks's FAT FS was buggy. The bug only affected one flavor (I don't remember if it was FAT12, 16, or 32), but it was clearly reproducible and clearly an OS fault. It was a corner case and we found some way around it (like avoiding an writes with a length of 1MB).

    Here's the usual rant you see here on slashdot, and it's true: since it was closed source, we couldn't verify that we'd caught all the bad cases, and we couldn't submit the fix to back to WindRiver.

    --
    HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
  7. Re:Like that joke.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You told it wrong. The computer guy says close all the windows, shut the car down, and restart it.

  8. Pretty much OT but an interesting question by nizo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  9. Re:Any theories on what caused the corruption? by confused+one · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You have to remember that the computer wasn't built this year. It was probably assembled several years ago and has been undergoing testing since.

  10. Security? by DoctorHibbert · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)?

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    Arbitrary sig
  11. Mars 3D Images by Guitarsenal · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  12. I've been wondering the same thing. by mosel-saar-ruwer · · Score: 0, Interesting

    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.

  13. If I were a NASA scientist... by mnmn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  14. Wow, scary by Validus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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."