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Curiosity Rover On Standby As NASA Addresses Computer Glitch
alancronin writes "NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been temporarily put into 'safe mode,' as scientists monitoring from Earth try to fix a computer glitch, the US space agency said. Scientists switched to a backup computer Thursday so that they could troubleshoot the problem, said to be linked to a glitch in the original computer's flash memory. 'We switched computers to get to a standard state from which to begin restoring routine operations,' said Richard Cook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the project manager for the Mars Science Laboratory Project, which built and operates Curiosity."
One can only hope that they have a C computer which will never be updated, and which can reset the rover to the initial state. Even if updates on A run fine for some time, experience in computing of the last decades shows that Murphy's Law is always lurking.
Does every incident in the real world need a reference to a TV show?
Are you sure you can't find an XKCD comic that would be more appropriate?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Fuck off. The big bang theory is beyond shite, I've tried watching it a handful of times and always gave up after 3 or 4 minutes. It's absolutely inusfferable tripe.
XKCD, on the other hand, is great.
Ok lets assume a cosmic ray corrupted some random block of flash memory...so what? Why should that lead to failure to upload anything or enter sleep mode?
Pretty much any fault, error, or out-of-bounds reading with any part of the rover causes it to stop whatever it is doing and wait for ground control to check it out and decide what to do. If the fault is with the computer itself, it makes sense to gracefully enter safe mode. It probably was a cosmic ray flipping a random bit, but you can't assume that when designing your fault handler.
If it were any old PC app this would be perfectly acceptable behavior. However for ultra expensive spacefaring things I would expect it to be designed to still try and be useful even if the southbridge cought fire.
See, I think you have that backwards. If it were a PC app it would be appropriate to just assume the error was insignificant or more likely not bother checking in the first place. If it's a more serious problem then eventually the app or OS might crash, the user will reboot, and if that doesn't work reinstall, and if not that then they'll just go get some new hardware.
For a multi-billion rover on another planet, you don't want to just wait and see what happens. Any anomaly at all should be cause for cautious, deliberate action. Heck, the whole project is run that way.
The rover was designed with a lot of redundancy and flexibility so that it can be useful even in the face of more serious problems, and if that turns out to be the case they'll find a way to make the rover as useful as possible. Missing a couple night's worth of downloads and delaying some activities in order to take the time to make sure they're maximizing the rover's future potential is an easy tradeoff.
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