Opportunity Prepares To Move While Spirit Sits

Like any new arrival grabbing all the attention, NASA engineers were thrilled to watch, the Opportunity rover sent home its first color snapshot from Mars.

However, engineers reported Monday that its ailing twin, Spirit, seemed to be suffering from a problem trying to manage too many files.

Sounds like the ANN office [OK, Art... I heard that.--E-I-C]
 
Spirit has spent 23 Martian days, or "sols," on the red planet, the last five or so without much activity, while Opportunity has completed two and will spend a week or two moving cautiously through the steps required for it to stand up and roll off onto Mars' terra firma.

The team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is increasingly convinced that Spirit's problem has a remedy, possibly related to the memory systems and their inability to manage an unexpected accumulation of files that built up during the robot's seven-month, 300 million-mile cruise from Earth.

In a press conference, mission manager Jennifer Trosper described in detail the steps by which the team progressed from last Wednesday's angst-inducing breakdown to today's hopeful prognosis, finding clues from the few snippets of transmitted data. "In the last week, my favorite image is the one where the signal went from a flat line to a beep," she said.

At one point, the rover sent data "from the year 2053," she said. ". . . There weren't a lot of scenarios that would put us in 2053 on Mars."

Engineers temporarily disabled the computer's flash memory, which is similar to the system used by digital cameras to retain photographs whether the power is on or off. Trosper said one theory is that Spirit's random-access memory, or RAM, has too little capacity to manage the file buildup in the flash memory.

As many of us do with our own personal computers, NASA engineers plan to ease the burden on the rover's data collection and storage system by deleting hundreds of the unnecessary files. The Opportunity team will take a measure of prevention handlers will see to it that any similar backlog in Opportunity's memory is also purged.

The team expects that Spirit could be back in operation in two or three weeks, but Trosper said it is not yet clear whether it can be fully restored. "It's kind of like we have a patient in rehab, and we are nursing her back to health."

Spirit is sitting in a Connecticut-size bowl called Gusev Crater, the possible site of an ancient lake. Opportunity is halfway around the planet on a vast flat equatorial plain called Meridiani, where an orbiting U.S. spacecraft earlier detected a large deposit of a mineral called hematite, which on Earth usually forms in association with water.

"We're looking out back across a pretty spectacular landscape," said Jim Bell, also of Cornell University, leader of the rovers' panoramic-camera team.

The image shows the lander's nesting place inside a shallow crater about the size of a school auditorium.

FMI: www.nasa.gov