Mars Rover Spirit Connection Established

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/02/active_sync.html">http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/02/active_sync.html</a><br /><br />"After a few weeks of speculation about why NASA suddenly lost contact with the Spirit rover, engineers stumbled on a simple software upgrade that quickly restored contact."<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/hansberry/2004/20040207-spiritrover.jpg" /><br /><b>This simple link between NASA and the Spirit rover has become a major problem.</b><br /><br />Turns out a quick trip to Microsoft's Pocket PC site to download the latest version of ActiveSync cleared the whole thing up! :lol:

[kaitanium]

haha i cant tell if this is a joke or if its true

[jgrnt1]

I can see a bunch of NASA geeks sitting around a PC, cursing Microsoft, doing weekly deletions of partnerships, sometimes followed by hard-resetting the rover.

[Sheynk]

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Wow....maybe thats the cause of aLL our problems

[Techtoys]

If only Beagle had been Psion based.... :D

[Ed Hansberry]

If only Beagle had been Psion based.... :D
Maybe it was Palm based. Couldn't multitask so it crashed. :grinning devil:

[MaximumPDA]

That was funny :) . So I don’t want to hear anybody bitchin about how they can’t get there iPAQ to sync via Bluetooth anymore...these guys got it to work over RF at 300 million miles away. Of course at 128 kilobits per second I’ll take WiFi or BT any day. Now I’m to shop for one of those funky UHF antennas to stick on my iPAQ so I can sync it between work and home, I’m not sure if I can get used to this backpack transmitter however… 8O

--Bill

[Busdriver]

Funny as.........well, this is funny. :D

[egads]

It was all of thoses duplicate contacts that filled up the flash memory on the rover. They just needed to run a contact scrubber program :)

[MaximumPDA]

In an unrelated story NASA purchases Scary Bear Software (http://www.scarybearsoftware.com/ppc_cn_overview.html) lock stock and barrel. When asked to comment if this had anything to do with the rover and the Notification Event Database overflow this is what mission coordinators had to say: “We stand by our technology and technology partners, the Scary Bear purchase was an unrelated move to future proof further projects going forward and does not indicate any lack of faith in our current software partners or their current released products that may generate unnecessary Event Notifications.”

[Jonathon Watkins]

It was all of thoses duplicate contacts that filled up the flash memory on the rover. They just needed to run a contact scrubber program :)
8O So close to the truth! :lol:

[Perk]

Wow, if NASA is using MS, we're in for a bumpy ride, hehe


:mrgreen:

[Kevin Daly]

Nah, my money's on a miss-placed Record button. Just as the iPAQ 5550 is designed so that you will be constantly adjusting volume whether you want to or not, many devices are afflicted with Involuntary Recording Syndrome (IRS).
Example: I had a user conducting a field trial of a .NET Compact Framework application a while ago in a somewhat extreme environment. Everything was going well until the application gave a "Managed Out of Memory Exception" and locked up. I thought "How the &lt;expletive deleted> did that happen?", since I had been very careful about releasing resources...and confirmed this by double checking and retesting the code.
What happened to the garbage collector? thought I.
Then when I received the device for diagnosis I found that memory was absolutely full...of blank recorded notes. The Record button was so placed that the user kept inadvertently triggering recordings without knowing it (this made worse by being in a cold environment with reduced dexterity).
So there was no memory left for the device to allocate or free up. I made a note to disable the Record button in the production version.

Anyway, that looks like a good fit to me for the problems reported with Spirit. They probably placed the Record button (you know, so any astronauts stranded there in future years can leave dramatic diary notes) underneath, and made it big and sticky-outty so you couldn't miss it.

[dean_shan]

Yes BBspot does it again. They are one of the best humour sites on the Internet.

[Jaap van Ees]

Yes BBspot does it again. They are one of the best humour sites on the Internet.

Humour? HUMOUR?? 8O You mean it's a joke?










(couldn't resist :mrgreen: )

[Shraga18]

C'mon people, what's wrong with you?!? The minute I heard the problem had to do Flash memory, I knew what had happened: They must've been using Sandisk!

[Jonathon Watkins]

...They must've been using Sandisk!

8O It all makes sense now! :lol:

[Rob Alexander]

So they're depending on ActiveStynch, eh? Well that would explain the 90 day projected mission life. :)

[Jon Westfall]

I'd imagine that getting the accessories for the rover (i.e. aluminum case, travel adapter, etc...) must be worse than trying to find decent priced ones for my i-mate....

and how the heck are you supposed to perform a hard reset on it when your stylus is here and the reset hole is on another planet... its hard to have the dexterity to hard-reset some devices when the hole is within reach.

And my vote for what went wrong? It all started when someone at NASA figured they could store a few mp3's on there to take from work to home...

[The PocketTV Team]

haha i cant tell if this is a joke or if its true
It's certainely a joke, since the rover is running Linux :)

[Hau Wei]

It's certainely a joke, since the rover is running Linux :)

To be more specific, it's running a proprietary embedded OS made by Wind River called VxWorks.

http://www.windriver.com/marsrover/index.html

How clever of those NASA engineers not to rely on Activesync! :twisted:

Originally reported on Wired News:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,62088-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1

[The PocketTV Team]

Ok... I read somewhere in EE-times that there was some Linux stuff on the rover... but maybe they use only some of the opensource apps.

[Hau Wei]

Ok... I read somewhere in EE-times that there was some Linux stuff on the rover... but maybe they use only some of the opensource apps.\

Yeah, possibly...Java is involved too! The software they used to control the rover is in Java.

http://mars.telascience.org/

The one posted on the site is a toned down version but still pretty fun! :lol:

[The PocketTV Team]

Ok... I read somewhere in EE-times that there was some Linux stuff on the rover... but maybe they use only some of the opensource apps.\

Yeah, possibly...Java is involved too! The software they used to control the rover is in Java.


You mean the Autonomous Rover Navigation System ?

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/video/movies/mer_rovernav_240.mov

:)

[Hau Wei]

You mean the Autonomous Rover Navigation System ?

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/video/movies/mer_rovernav_240.mov

:)

Perhaps...not sure which system runs Java...or perhaps they ran Java on top of the VxWorks OS. Heheh.

Whatever the case, so long as it isn't Microsoft Activesync...they are pretty safe! :lol: