14 DAY TRIAL // According to officials at the American space agency, the Spirit robot, part of the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, is currently suffering from what humans would call amnesia. In other words, it fails to “remember” data that have been previously recorded. At the same time, it seems reluctant to provide its mission controllers with any information as to why its flash memory doesn't work properly. This is very bad, officials say, because this specific type of memory is particularly designed to store data when the rover is in the “power off” mode.
“Engineers operating Spirit are investigating the reboots and the possibly unrelated amnesia events, in which Spirit unexpectedly fails to record data into the type of memory, called flash, where information is preserved even when power is off. Spirit has had three of these amnesia events in the past 10 days, plus one on January 25th. No causal link has been determined between the amnesia events and the reboots,” a press release on NASA's website says.
“We are proceeding cautiously, but we are encouraged by knowing that Spirit is stable in terms of power and thermal conditions and has been responding to all communication sessions for more than a week now,” the Chief of the rover sequencing team, Sharon Laubach, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, adds. Laubach is in charge of checking and developing the command sets that the robots get from Earth every day.
At this point, the people at NASA are trying to regain control of the robot and to resume scientific investigations. They also want to move Spirit towards its destination and to test each mechanical component, to ensure that the glitch has not been caused by a hardware malfunction. “For example, if we do determine that we can no longer use the flash memory reliably, we could design operations around using the random-access memory,” Laubach explains. This means that all data would have to be relaid back to Earth every time before the rover enters the “stand by” mode.