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ack! NASA lost comm with Mars Rover


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Secondly.. the Glaug... was.. scary..

...looks like it's from the Zentran "Alternate Lifestyle" Battalion....

:lol::lol::lol:

It does suck about the rover. But Humanity has to play catch-up with it's own destiny. It was the public's waning interest, even disinterest, in the Apollo program which sucked a lot of the energy out of the space program.

What the world, not just the United States, needs is a strong space program. Every time something new happens, no matter who does it, the world gets excited. That excitement needs to be harnessed with the realistic promise of lofty goals, not just words to placate the masses or, as some might say, get re-elected.

Instead of the forthcoming "space cold war" against China that's being hinted at, all countries with their eyes set on space should join together and achieve these goals layed before us. The Int'l Space Station was a good start, but it's obvious the U.S. and Russia planned and wanted to have the lead role.

The space-race of the cold war was as much, if not more so, a tool of nationalistic pride rather than true exploration. It's time to shed that weak premise and do exactly what a majority of people want to do. Conquer the "unconquerable".

Nationalistic pride is not conducive to acheiving these goals. A true space-race only has one opponent: Humanity vs. Itself.

OK... I've been long-winded. Time to let this thread get back on track.

Very well put! Bravo!

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Looks like contact has been restablished
PASADENA, Calif. (Jan. 23) -- NASA received data from the Spirit rover Friday morning for the first time in two days, easing scientists' anxiety that the Mars mission had come to a calamitous halt.

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.ad...108053709990007

"NASA today denied that the first communication with the Spirit Rover following its mysterious radio black out over the past two days was "I'm sorry, Dave, I cannot do that." :lol:

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Looks like contact has been restablished
PASADENA, Calif. (Jan. 23) -- NASA received data from the Spirit rover Friday morning for the first time in two days, easing scientists' anxiety that the Mars mission had come to a calamitous halt.

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.ad...108053709990007

They also reported that @ CNN Headline News. It seems that the rover detects a hardware problem & it keeps on rebooting.

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For all you Microsoft/Intel bashers, might find it interesting to know... that the Rover's running VxWorks... on a 20 Mghz Power PC.

That's just weird, knowing that we have settop boxes running VxWorks here in the office that's more powerful than what they've got up there.

-Al

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Well, I guess the Spirit Rover is experiencing a Minmay-Attack as of Friday 3:55pm EST 1/23/04:

  http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.html

The crippled Spirit rover remains in critical condition on the surface of Mars, engineers said today, the victim of ongoing electronic seizures that have caused its central computer to reboot itself more than 60 times over the past two days.

Engineers successfully coaxed the rover to beam back limited engineering data during two brief communications sessions and they were relieved to discover the spacecraft's power system was providing the necessary life support. But Spirit's state of mind was clearly -- and unusually -- different in both sessions, ruling out any simple explanations for what might have gone wrong.

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Speaking to a friend of mine from JPL today, he mentioned that the operating temps onboard the rover have been very high, very close to the design limits - something on the order of 80C. Exacerbating this is the fact that they've been working the poor thing pretty hard with the sheer bulk of uploads (data/pictures), so they've had to scale those back a bit (even prior to the blackout period).

Imagine that you were running your desktop PC in a small 100F+ degree, closed room with no ventilation, overclocked and with no cooling mods. Would you be surprised if it constantly rebooted itself? :lol:

Seriously though, I hope they're able to salvage an acceptable level of functionality and continue the mission as best they can... :(

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Speaking to a friend of mine from JPL today, he mentioned that the operating temps onboard the rover have been very high, very close to the design limits - something on the order of 80C. Exacerbating this is the fact that they've been working the poor thing pretty hard with the sheer bulk of uploads (data/pictures), so they've had to scale those back a bit (even prior to the blackout period).

Imagine that you were running your desktop PC in a small 100F+ degree, closed room with no ventilation, overclocked and with no cooling mods. Would you be surprised if it constantly rebooted itself?  :lol:

Seriously though, I hope they're able to salvage an acceptable level of functionality and continue the mission as best they can...  :(

I thought the maximum temperature on Mars is about 20C because of it's distance from the sun and the lack of atmosphere.

Mars is a pretty cold place, especially at night in the double digit negatives. Why is the rover running so hot? Did they really design this thing's computer hardware with so little ventilation/cooling? Is everything packed so tightly that they couldn't even take advantage of the ambient temperature of the planet?

My computer got stuck in a reboot loop once when I forgot to switch my CPU fan to higher RPMs when I was playing a game. It crashed and kept on rebooting due to driver failure and registry corruption.

Edited by ComicKaze
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I thought the maximum temperature on Mars is about 20C because of it's distance from the sun and the lack of atmosphere.

Mars is a pretty cold place, especially at night in the double digit negatives. Why is the rover running so hot? Did they really design this thing's computer hardware with so little ventilation/cooling? Is everything packed so tightly that they couldn't even take advantage of the ambient temperature of the planet?

My computer got stuck in a reboot loop once when I forgot to switch my CPU fan to higher RPMs when I was playing a game. It crashed and kept on rebooting due to driver failure and registry corruption.

You are correct that the surface temp is relatively cold on Mars. The catch is that they can't perform any of the hard work at night, as it would quickly deplete the batteries (the solar arrays supply much of the operating current). They pretty much have to run it while it's "hot" out, and let it "sleep" during Martian night.

Regardless, it wouldn't matter much how well it's vented to the outside, because they are so jam-packed together inside - the transmitters/receivers/buses/CPUs likely can't be made much smaller than they already are, and their proximity limits thermal and electronic efficiency. Remember that the engineers had to adhere to a strict size/weight/mass target for everything to work as planned, and that likely rules out very complex cooling solutions (no Pelt coolers for Spirit's CPUs ;) ).

Remember that electronics need a minimum temperature to operate safely as well, and that would preempt any kind of outer surface mounting scheme or constant direct ventilation.

Here's to hoping that Opportunity fares better!

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