Spirit rover uncovers a rocky surprise

[Lionel]

Scientists declared NASA's Spirit rover completely "healed" on Friday, after the probe suffered computer problems that engineers now say they made worse during their diagnosis. Spirit marked its return to science operations by brushing off the dust from a rock nicknamed Adirondack, revealing a surprisingly dark surface underneath.Meanwhile, half a world away, the twin Opportunity rover closed in on another geological mystery — an outcropping of Martian bedrock called "Snout." At the end of Friday's workday, the six-wheeled robot geologist was about half a yard (meter) away from its target, and roughly 23 feet (7 meters) from its landing platform.Spirit and Opportunity are the identical halves of an $820 million mission to determine whether ancient Mars could have had liquid water for a long enough time to support the development of life. After a seven-month journey, Spirit landed Jan. 3 in the 95-mile-wide (150-kilometer-wide) Gusev Crater, and Opportunity came down three weeks later in Meridiani Planum, on the opposite side of Mars.

Spirit had been crippled for the past two weeks because its flash memory system — a setup similar to that used on digital cameras here on Earth — couldn't handle the size and number of files that were being stored onboard. After diagnosing the problem, engineers had to reboot the system remotely, and mission manager Jennifer Trosper said the rover now appears to be operating normally.

View: Full Article | Source: MSNBC