after a bitter fight, and a loss of communication for over 24 hours, nasa finally hears from embittered mars rover.
nasa musta bought spirit flowers. damn robots, so frickin testy.
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NASA Gets New Signal From Mars Rover
By ANDREW BRIDGES, AP Science Writer
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA engineers got a 10-minute signal Friday morning from the Spirit rover and planned further communications with it in an effort to diagnose and possibly patch up their ailing robotic patient on Mars.
NASA heard from the six-wheeled rover at about 4:30 a.m., but officials did not immediately elaborate on the signal in a statement released early Friday. If it contains significant data, the transmission would mark the first such signal in two days — a period of anxious waiting for scientists.
Engineers hope Spirit will manage to send data, which can be used to assess the health of the spacecraft, pinpoint any problems and allow NASA to begin working on a potential fix or fixes.
Scientists and spokesmen at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory did not immediately return calls seeking comment on Friday. The statement said Friday's signal was received by NASA's Deep Space Network antenna complex near Madrid, Spain.
Since Wednesday, its 19th day on Mars, the Spirit had sent back to Earth only meaningless radio noise or simple beeps acknowledging receipt of commands.
Among the possible causes: a corruption of its software or computer memory. If the software is awry, NASA can fix it from Earth by beaming patches across more than 100 million miles of space or by rebooting the rover's computer. But if the problem lies with the rover's hardware, the situation would be far more grave — perhaps beyond repair.
Baffled scientists have struggled to pinpoint the trouble.
"It is precisely like trying to diagnose a patient with different symptoms that don't corroborate," said Firouz Naderi, manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars exploration program.
Spirit is one-half of an $820 million mission. Its twin, Opportunity, is expected to land on Mars late Saturday. The twin rovers are supposed to examine the Red Planet's dry rocks and soil for evidence that it was once wetter and more hospitable to life.
Until Wednesday, Spirit had functioned almost flawlessly and NASA scientists and engineers had been jubilant.
Cushioned by its air bags, the rover made a bull's-eye landing, surviving what was by far the most dangerous part of the mission — the descent through the atmosphere at 12,000 mph. Then on Jan. 15, in another nail-biting moment for NASA, the rover safely rolled down a ramp onto Mars' ruddy soil without becoming snagged.
It has snapped thousands of pictures, including breathtaking panoramic views and microscopic images of the Martian soil. It also carried out preliminary work analyzing the minerals and elements that make up its surroundings.
Steven Squyres of Cornell University, the mission's main scientist, cautioned that communications problems are common on spacecraft.
The problem surfaced while Spirit was preparing to resume analysis of its first rock, just a few yards from where it landed.
Early Thursday, NASA initially heard nothing from Spirit that would indicate it was in "fault mode," a state that the rover enters by itself when it has experienced a problem. Later, NASA sent a command to Spirit as if it were in fault mode, anyway. Spirit acknowledged with a beep that it received the command, indicating an onboard problem. That puzzled engineers.
The rover has since missed several scheduled opportunities to communicate, both directly with Earth and by way of two NASA satellites in orbit around Mars.
Preliminary indications suggested the rover's radio was working, and it continued to generate power from the sun with its solar panels. Spirit's internal clock also was running and had roused the rover several times on cue.
Engineers hoped to receive engineering data from Spirit by early Friday, JPL director Charles Elachi said.
"We can do a diagnostic and understand what happened, what are the corrective actions that need to be done and how do we bring it carefully and thoughtfully to its normal operation mode," Elachi said.
In New York City, Jim Garvin, NASA's lead scientist for Mars exploration, said on CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman" that scientists have "gotten a heartbeat" from the rover.
He said the team was "communicating with it at very low rates to tell it how to wake itself back up."
Initially, engineers believed bad weather on Earth — a thunderstorm near a Deep Space Network antenna in Australia — had caused the communications glitch. But weather was later discounted as the source.
