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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.....
".. 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.
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.
(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...
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...
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?
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?
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.
How come we're not awash with "Spirit was willing, but flash was weak" jokes?
Actually, Spirit's problems began when one of the NASA engineers created a file named "-rf" in his home directory.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
"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-
Apparently it was simply too many files and the FS ran out of inodes. Remember that they're constrained to a 256MB file system. It wouldn't surprise me if they used an 8 bit or 16 bit number for the inode count. (Ah, the joys of Vx(Doesn't)Works.)
On another note, does anyone know exactly what they're deleting here? While I understand that they need to get this mission underway, is there a chance they could lose valuable mission or navigational information?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
According to spaceflightnow.com, the files are from the cruise stage (travel from Earth to Mars) of the mission...
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.
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.
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!!!!
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)
It kind of makes me wonder, hadn't they dont extensive testing of the rovers before they sent them off?... I thought they did full-walkthrough type tests on the rovers here on earth, i.e taking pictures, navigating.. but what?... now the darn thing runs out of memory?.. I bet someone is smacking themselves for not checking that out properly beforehand.
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.
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
They're deleting all the telemetry and science data Spirit's taken since launch. The OS is in the EEPROMS. With one exception, they can repeat all of the measurements & photos that will be lost. The exception: As one of the orbiters happened to fly directly overhead it took some atmospheric measurements; and, simultaneously Spirit performed the same measurement from the ground -- This would have given them a full thickness measurement of what was going on in the atmosphere at that moment.
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
Yes, that's what I always say when I fix a bug.
256 MB of Flash ROM?
Should have sprung for the iPod mini instead...
Badum-dum-ching!
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...
They had testing but someone decided to install porn on the lander. :(
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
"... 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
Spirit just needs a good jump start. Anyone got some really long jumper cables?
Apparently it was simply too many files and the FS ran out of inodes.
Although that is the simple version that most of the press has been relaying, if you've watched the press conferences, the engineers have been carefull to say that they have not been able to fully reproduce the exact same errors on their test rovers here on Earth. The exact cause of the problem really hasn't been determined. And yes, they did stress test the file system before they sent the rovers up and they never saw the type of problem that they're having now.
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.
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!"
rm -- -rf
Or just use your favorite GUI file manager.
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.
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.
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
It also probably waited a while to be launched, and it took seven months just to get there.
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!
The memory is not faulty. It is a bug in the filesystem software. The memory isn't full, but there are more files than the rover can handle. They were basically letting everything pile up, so the rover had eighteen days worth of files (and pre-landing files on top of that.) With the other rover they are deleting the files after they are received on Earth.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
The reality of the situation is, first string (Russia) is all tied up doing manned missions, so they have delegated the robot probes to the second string (usa). This is mostly due to the little detail, second string has no operational man rated vehicles to work with....
Not quite sure how China plays in yet, but, they also have a manned program these days, so, second place is actually up for grabs, the robot probes may soon have to take the third bench....
Seriously, when are people going to realise that you can't just take modern components you'd use with your computer and put it in a space craft?
Not only did it take ~7 months (I think) to get to Mars, meaning it was already 7 months "obsolete" when it landed, it was also probably not launched for a LONG time after it was completed. They have to test it extensively and test for every possible scenario they can come up with. They also have to have equipment that is suitable for the extremes of space travel. High G forces, extreme vibration, extreme temperature differences, radiation, and probably thousands of other things I don't know about.
Put simply, YOUR PC THAT SITS ON YOUR DESKTOP WON'T SURVIVE A ROCKET LAUNCH INTO SPACE. And if it did survive the actual launch and made it into space, it would fail very quickly.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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
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."