The computer woes of the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover appear to be solved. The robot is now being readied for wheeling itself to a large-sized crater within the Gusev Crater landing site.
All indications are that the memory surgery on Spirit "worked extremely well," said Jennifer Trosper, JPLs Spirit Mission Manager. She said that the patient is healed of a computer overload problem, fixed by carefully erasing and reformatting Spirits flash file system.
Spirit is in great health, Trosper said during an early morning press briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
Brush off
Trosper said that on Thursday a demonstration link between Spirit and Europes Mars Express worked very well. "We have our international interplanetary communications network established even more so out there at Mars."
Science duties by Spirit include giving the rock nicknamed Adirondack the brush off.
Thanks to a brush on the robots Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) a surprise coating on Adirondack was whisked away, said Stephen Gorevan, Payload Lead for the RAT and head of Honeybee Robotics in New York. "This was a big surprisethe greatest interplanetary brushing of all time."
Today, Spirit will use the RAT to help scientists glean more information about Adirondacks internal composition.
Spirit is expected to begin driving on Saturday about 270 yards (250 meters), on a step-by-step jaunt toward a crater nicknamed Bonneville.
"Theres going to be a lot of driving on Spirit," Trosper said. Scientists are eager to study the walls of Bonneville for geological clues regarding the history of Gusev Crater.
Bug in our court
Glenn Reeves, JPLs Flight Software Architect for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project said that sorting out what ailed Spirit was a major effort, one that has now led to stabilizing the problem and debugging the robots software.
The investigation into the computer glitch is still on-going, Reeves said. "This is definitely a bug in our court that we have to fix."
"The first problem is that we ran out of memory. A subsequent problem after that is we managed to corrupt the file system," Reeves said. "In a sense, were back to the beginning...and I think at this stage were very confident that we understand what the problem is. We have a procedure in placeto work around this problem indefinitely if we have to," he said.
Reeves told SPACE.com that the computer issue on Spirit has the same potential to crop up on Opportunity. Procedures have been put in place to prevent the software glitches from reoccurring on Spirit and showing up on the Opportunity rover on the other side of Mars, he said.
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