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Mars rover has unexplained reboots


UM-Bot

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Image credit: NASA
Image credit: NASA
NASA's Mars rover Spirit has been experiencing technical issues, rebooting twice for unknown reasons. The rover has been exploring the Martian surface since 2004 and has carried on functioning well past its life-expectancy.

"NASA's aging Mars rover Spirit has rebooted its computer at least twice for unknown reasons. Rover project manager John Callas at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said Monday that the rover is in a stable operations state called automode and can remain that way for some time while the problem is diagnosed. "

arrow3.gifView: Full Article | arrow3.gifSource: PhysOrg.com
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Image credit: NASA

Image credit: NASA

NASA's Mars rover Spirit has been experiencing technical issues, rebooting twice for unknown reasons. The rover has been exploring the Martian surface since 2004 and has carried on functioning well past its life-expectancy.

"NASA's aging Mars rover Spirit has rebooted its computer at least twice for unknown reasons. Rover project manager John Callas at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said Monday that the rover is in a stable operations state called automode and can remain that way for some time while the problem is diagnosed. "

arrow3.gifView: Full Article | linked-imageSource: PhysOrg.com

It's the martian equivalent of a Windows Tech - reboot until it works.

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I was going to say it must be running on Vista? That would explain it.

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So a bug attacks the Martian rover... I feel a conspiracy coming on.

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Did they try running it in compatibility mode?

Maybe Nasa should switch over to Linux.

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I read somewhere that it had to to with the Eddies found on Mars....

http://www.physorg.com/news154893335.html

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new 3D model linking magnetic fields to the transfer of energy in space might help solve a physics mystery first observed in the solar wind 15 years ago.

Scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville and Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, developed the simulation while studying turbulence and energy transfer in the plasma carried away from the sun in the solar wind.

"We were attempting to understand the spacecraft observations that have seen this kind of turbulence," said Dr. Dastgeer Shaikh, an assistant professor in the Physics Department at UAHuntsville. "This was seen first by the Wind spacecraft launched in 1994, but has also been seen by other satellite instruments since then."

If small eddies in the solar wind are more efficient than expected at transferring energy, that might help explain the hot particles discovered by instruments aboard Wind and other spacecraft.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1993mppf.procQ...2B

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_devil

Martian dust devils

linked-image

Mission members monitoring the Spirit rover on Mars reported on March 12, 2005, that a lucky encounter with a dust devil had cleaned the solar panels of that robot. Power levels dramatically increased and daily science work was anticipated to be expanded.[16] A similar phenomenon (solar panels mysteriously cleaned of accumulated dust) had previously been observed with the Opportunity rover, and dust devils had also been suspected as the cause.[17]
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Aha! Cue conspiratorial thinking. They, of course, have instructed NASA to reboot it to wipe the evidence of ancient civilisations that it discovered.

:yes:

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The rover has been exploring the Martian surface since 2004 and has carried on functioning well past its life-expectancy.

Isn't that why?

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It's working in an evironment that the builders of the rover could only simulate or hypothesise, so the fact it is behaving in a non-linear way, seems to go hand in hand with the environment it works in, any number of environmental factors could have caused it to reboot twice. When has anything we put into space ever worked perfectly anyway lol.

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