The transmissions arrived during 90-minute window of opportunity as the rover entered the martian morning. That's the good news. It means the robotic field geologist is keeping itself healthy enough to transmit information.
But in a fit of robotic outrage, Spirit is rebooting itself over and over again, dozens and dozens of times in a futile attempt to restore itself to normalcy.
One thing is obvious. The rover has seen better days, and may not be on active science duty for an extended period of time.
Not behaving normally
"We do have a serious problem" in our ability to eventually work around issues, said Peter Theisinger, JPL Project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover program. "The chances that it'll be perfect again are not good," he said at an early morning press briefing here at JPL.
Spirit's flight software is not behaving normally, Theisinger explained.
The rover has been rebooting itself since Wednesday. Its onboard processor wakes up, loads flight software, then uncovers a condition that, in turn, causes the rover's brain to reset itself after a period of time. It then repeats that cycle.
"Whatever causes the reset is not always perceived to be the same," Theisinger added, making the root cause of the problem all the more elusive.
There are indications that Spirit is restless, Theisinger reported, not going to sleep at night.
Software patch
Theisinger said engineering and software teams do not know what started the chain of events that have upset Spirit operations.
"I think, personally, that it's a sequence of events and we don't know, therefore, the consequences. I think it's difficult at this very preliminary stage to assume that we did not have some type of hardware event that caused this to start."
To what extent operators can beam up a software patch to ignore that hardware issue - if that turns out to be the trouble spot -- is not know. "We've got a long way to go here with the patient," Theisinger said.
Theisinger told SPACE.com that the problem now being wrestled with appears to be relegated solely to Spirit and not be a problem lurking within the look-alike Opportunity rover set to land Saturday night, around 9:05 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Temper Tantrum
One technical tidbit surfaced today about what was taking place onboard Spirit before it began to throw its temper tantrum.
Engineers were testing a motor in Spirit's Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES). The motor drives the elevation mirror within the Panoramic Mast Assembly -- a long tube-shaped structure at the front of the rover.
Experiments were being done on Mars to compare temperature ranges and electrical currents needed to drive the mirror motor with those measured pre-launch in a vacuum chamber here at JPL. These tests were in process when Spirit seems to have started to experience problems.
One day at a time
A special anomaly team at JPL has been formed, tasked to troubleshoot a myriad of possible scenarios that led to Spirit's bewildering condition.
"I expect for this to go on in this mode for several days, talking to the spacecraft, gathering more data, winnowing out theories, and testing those theories," Theisinger explained. "I think we should expect that we will not be restoring functionality to Spirit for a significant period of time," he added, lasting "many days, perhaps a couple of weeks, even in the best of circumstances."
"We're slogging through this one day at a time," Theisinger concluded.
Mars Rovers: Complete Coverage
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