January 29, 2004

Spirit Lives!

The first Martian rover came back to life and resumed transmitting. The problem appears to have been related to the onboard computer.

The rover's computer rebooted itself more than 100 times over a two-day period and, at first, sent back beeps but no data. Engineers have since determined that the problem appears to involve too many files overloading the onboard computer memory.

Over 100 reboots in 2 days. Hmmm. Sounds like the operating system came from Redmont. And what’s up with this - we spent 820 million on this thing and it’s running out of onboard memory? For 820 Million you’d would have expected at least 50 GB of RAM…

Posted by Clancy at January 29, 2004 1:26 PM