The Mars Spirit rover has stopped sending intelligible data back to Earth (Google), mission officials said today. The project manager, Peter C. Theisinger, described the problem as “a very serious anomaly on the vehicle.”
A team had met through the night and this morning looking for answers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “There was no one single fault that explains all the observables,” he said at a news conference. “It was a random pattern of zeroes and ones,” he said, adding that the rover’s radio was on but that Spirit was not sending information.
“We don’t know what is the state of the software,” he continued, saying if it was a software problem then it could be fixed by beaming corrections across more than 100 million miles of space. A hardware problem would be more difficult to resolve, Mr. Cook said.
Spirit landed on Mars on Jan. 3 and is one half of a $820 million mission. Its twin, Opportunity, is scheduled to land on Mars early Sunday. On Jan. 15 the Spirit rover rolled down a ramp ready to rock and roll on a three-month mission to search Gusev Crater.
Yesterday after NASA’s Mars Spirit rover refused to download data it had collected on a pyramid-shape rock it was investigating. NASA blamed the weak radio signal caused by rain and lightning over the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex, which is relaying instructions to the rover. Now it appears Australia’s weather may have been unfairly fingered
DailyWireless has more on Spirit in Dirt, Mars Telecommunications and Telepresence.
