Chaos Magnet

Contact with Spirit lost

Apparently scientists have lost contact with Spirit, the Mars rover. it's been over 24 hours since they were able to talk to it.

Theories abound:

"There is no one single fault that explains all the observables," Theisinger said. Among the possibilities could be a software glitch that caused the rover to reset itself, or a power surge, or a temperature-related hardware failure, or perhaps even a cosmic-ray hit, he said.

And this isn't the first time that this kind of thing has come up. During the Mars Pathfinder mission, engineers had to reset the rover's software serveral times.

So here's what I don't understand: shouldn't the first order of business be to figure out why we keep losing these things? I mean, I would assume that an $820 million project includes some pretty extensive software testing. (But then, I would have assumed the all the teams working on such a project would have been using the same units of measurement, which I guess hasn't been a safe assumption on past projects.)

Not that I necessarily agree with my friend Eric's notion that there's something up there that doesn't want us poking around -- though I can never tell when he's joking -- but it seems to me that getting this kind of information would be a project worth doing.

Technorati tags: Mars | Spirit | contact lost |

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