NASA's Spirit Is Back on Track

On Saturday, experts at NASA finally resumed breathing, after the Mars rover Spirit eventually snapped out of its mysterious set of problems and started moving on the Martian surface again, following several days of not recording any images and not moving a single inch. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, stopped getting data from the robot in late January, and the team worked around the clock, running diagnostics and trying to figure out what went wrong.

Officials at JPL announced at the time that Spirit had missed its scheduled check-in with Earth, and that it failed to record any of its activities for that Sunday, which was very confusing for the team that had been handling both Spirit and Opportunity for the last five years, ever since they went on the Red Planet. Following commands received from NASA, the rover moved about 1 foot (30 centimeters) this Saturday, but shortly became stuck in a protruded rock on the planet's surface, as its front right wheel was no longer turning.

Now, its handlers are writing lines of instructions that will guide Spirit on a new trajectory, which will hopefully get the robot past the troublesome rock. "We may not find any data that will explain what happened on Sol 1800, but there's no evidence that whatever happened then has recurred on subsequent sols," NASA rover engineering team member Jacob Matijevic underlines. One possible explanation for the fact that Spirit failed to record any of its activities for Sunday would be that it was hit by an outburst of cosmic-ray, which might have disabled its permanent non-volatile memory banks.

The scientists assure this is most likely what happened, because the readings match those resulted from a similar scenario, in which NASA purposefully used this mode for the memory banks during a failure Spirit encountered more than 5 years ago. However, now everything seems to be running fine, but some people at NASA consider that we may see even more such glitches occurring over time, as the battered rovers trail across the Martian surface. They've exceeded their planned mission time by more than 20 times, and have gathered sufficient data for 4 or 5 separate missions to the Red Planet.