Mars rover has unexplained reboots

can someone tell the martian to stop pushing the reboot button

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. " View: Full Article | Source: PhysOrg.... [More]

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

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

that's what they get for using dial up.

Did they try running it in compatibility mode? Maybe Nasa should switch over to Linux.

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 tu... [More]

Aha! Cue conspiratorial thinking. They, of course, have instructed NASA to reboot it to wipe the evidence of ancient civilisations that it discovered.

The rover has been exploring the Martian surface since 2004 and has carried on functioning well past its life-expectancy. Isn't that why?

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.