Spirit hiccup

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2009/04/13 05:57 CDT

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Another of those dreaded "status reports" from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory arrived in my mailbox just now. Apparently, over the Easter weekend, Spirit's computer mysteriously reset twice. One of the reboots happened while it was using its high-gain antenna to talk to Earth, which apparently affected its communications. Other than these mysterious resets, the rover's in good health: they quote John Callas as saying "We do know that Spirit's batteries are charged, the solar arrays are producing energy and temperatures are well within allowable ranges. We have time to respond carefully and investigate this thoroughly....The rover is in a stable operations state called automode and taking care of itself. It could stay in this stable mode for some time if necessary while we diagnose the problem."

tay tuned.