Debugging The Spirit Rover

icebike writes "eeTimes has a story on how the Mars Rover was essentially reprogrammed from millions of miles away. 'How do you diagnose an embedded system that has rendered itself unobservable? That was the riddle a Jet Propulsion Laboratory team had to solve when the Mars rover Spirit capped a successful landing on the Martian surface with a sequence of stunning images and then, darkness.' The outcome strikes me as an extremely Lucky Hack, and the rover could have just as likely been lost forever. Are there lessons here that we can use here on the third rock for recovery of our messed up machines which we manage from afar via ssh?"