Mars Rover Doing Fine After Freakout
Posted in: NASA, science, space, Today's Chili
Spirit, one of NASA’s two Mars Rovers currently exploring the red planet, is doing fine after last week’s momentary glitch that caused it to temporarily lose its memory, the New York Times reports.
“Spirit is doing pretty good, as a matter of fact,” said R. William Nelson, the chief of the engineering team for the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, in the article.
The report said that the best guess for what happened is that Spirit somehow entered “cripple mode,” in which the rover avoids using flash memory and instead writes to so-called random access memory. As a result, NASA may have lost the data when the rover fell asleep after trying to execute a set of instructions. “It’s all very mysterious at this point, and we may never find out what happened,” Mr. Nelson said in the article.
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