

Spirit (Mars Rover) Sol 18 Anomaly - vinutheraj
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000702/

======
nostrademons
Lesson for engineers: build lots and lots of debugging hooks and panic buttons
into your systems. You'll need them.

I find it interesting that the initial problem amounted to what was basically
a memory leak. It affects Martian rovers just as much as Firefox!

I also find it amazing that as of now, the Mars rovers have been working for
over 2000 sols. For what was initially supposed to be a 90-day mission. When
the blog post was written, they were at 937 sols and the author thought _that_
was long.

~~~
dandelany
> Lesson for engineers: build lots and lots of debugging hooks and panic
> buttons into your systems. You'll need them.

Exactly... Especially when your hardware is 30 million miles away :)

> I also find it amazing that as of now, the Mars rovers have been working for
> over 2000 sols.

Me too, although when I looked it up, I found out that Spirit has been stuck
in a patch of soft ground since May... NASA engineers have been testing plans
on earth to get it unstuck. Photos here:

<http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/>

(start at 5/1). Hopefully they're as good at debugging mud as they are at
software!

------
shaddi
Just thought I'd point out (as a departing JPL intern...) that Spirit just
reached sol 2000 on Tuesday, more than five years after its original 90 sol
mission.

Even though it is still stuck (Free Spirit!), it's still performing useful
science, as is its twin Opportunity on the other side of the planet. Great
rovers and a great team at JPL who build and keep them running. I can't wait
to see MSL touch down in a couple years.

~~~
nostrademons
I think that needs to be a new Internet meme: "Free Spirit!" with a link to
the Mars Rovers page.

~~~
shaddi
Go for it: <http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/freespirit/>

:)

------
windsurfer
This reminds me of yesterday, when I accidental left a stray : in my
/etc/sudoers file and exited my editor. Couldn't get root access! Thanked the
developers who invented recovery mode so I could fix my dumb mistake.

