Friday, April 24th, 2009

Checking In With the Mars Rovers

As it finished its second Martian year on Mars, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit was beginning to examine a group of angular rocks given informal names corresponding to peaks in the Colorado Rockies. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Last Friday, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit suffered what team managers are calling a bout of temporary amnesia. Then, on Saturday, a computer onboard Spirit rebooted itself. The rover has had several other unexplained memory lapses and reboots, and the mission planners are searching for the cause. They're also hoping that changes to the rover's operating protocols might allow the rover to work around the bouts of amnesia, using different memory resources to keep operating reliably. We'll get an update on the mission, and talk about what else is new with the Mars rover program.