[Space] NASA - Mars Exploration Rover MER-A "Spirit" - Update Thread

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Spirit Rover Sending Data Again, Status Unclear

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 10:10 am ET
23 January 2004

NASA's Spirit rover communicated with ground controllers early this morning, sending back at first data for 10 minutes and giving hope that normal operations might resume.

The rover had gone mostly silent Wednesday, sending back only beeps to acknowledge it was alive. For unknown reasons, Spirit could not transmit data.

NASA officials said in a statement this morning they had received a signal at the agency's Deep Space Network antenna complex near Madrid, Spain at 7:34 a.m. ET.

Spirit communicated for 10 minutes initially and then later for 20 minutes more, for a total of a half-hour of data transmission.

The transmissions arrived during 90-minute window of opportunity after the rover woke in the Martian morning. Data was transmitted at a rate of 10 bits per second.

Officials did not indicate whether that was normal or how optimistic they are based on the transmission. Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory plan to send commands to Spirit seeking additional data today.

Engineers worked late into Thursday night trying unsuccessfully to establish normal communications with Spirit. Efforts to relay signals using NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor at 10:10 p.m. ET resulted in no contact, however. After a signal had been sent to the rover Thursday morning, Spirit replied with a simple tone but would not send data.

Officials yesterday expressed serious concern for the health of the rover but remained optimistic. If the problem involved hardware, they said, the situation would be grave. A software problem, they said, might be fixable -- fresh commands and even new software patches can be possibly uploaded to Spirit if it is in listening mode.

Indications Thursday were that the craft's batteries were in good shape, that its temperature was being properly maintained, and that it was indeed listening.

Scientists said Spirit's flight software or computer memory might have become corrupted. Either glitch could leave the robot's power supply healthy and allow adequate time for recovering control of the rover.

Spirit landed on Jan. 3 and is slated to scour the Gusev crater, near Mars' equator, for three months. Its twin, Opportunity, is due to land Saturday. The combined mission cost is $820 million.

Earlier Thursday, JPL Director, Charles Elachi, advised that everyone "stay calm, thoughtful and careful" and avoid making hasty decisions. "Sometimes you can do more harm than good by reacting too quickly," Elachi said.

Spirit can communicate with Earth directly via an onboard "X-band system," or it can beam signals up to either of NASA's two orbiting spacecraft using a UHF antenna. There are four chances each day to reach the orbiters.

NASA receives signals from spacecraft through its Deep Space Network (DSN) of tracking stations in Australia, Spain and California.

Direct Mars-to-Earth communications are reserved for critical Spirit mission data, such as rover health and engineering. It takes about 10 minutes for a radio message, moving at the speed of light, to travel between planets. Signals transmitted to the orbiters can be delayed as little as 90 minutes to as long as 24 hours because of the way each orbiter works and communicates with Earth.

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2004
1449 GMT (9:49 a.m. EST)

NASA's Deep Space Network communications station near Madrid, Spain, received a signal from the Spirit rover at 7:34 a.m. EST (1234 GMT) today, officials report.

"The transmissions came during a communication window about 90 minutes after Spirit woke up for the morning on Mars. The signal lasted for 10 minutes at a data rate of 10 bits per second," the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced.

Mission Control plans to issue commands to Spirit seeking additional data from the spacecraft during the subsequent few hours.

A news conference is planned for 1 p.m. EST today.

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1512 GMT (10:12 a.m. EST)

Mission Control has received actual data from Mars Exploration Rover Spirit after commanding the craft to transmit the information.

"The spacecraft sent limited data in a proper response to a ground command, and we're planning for commanding further communication sessions later today," said project manager Pete Theisinger.

Officials have not yet said what the data indicated or other details.

The data was received in a communication session that began at 8:26 a.m. EST (1326 GMT) and lasted 20 minutes at a data rate of 120 bits per second.

JPL says it sent the command to the rover at 8:02 a.m. EST (1302 GMT) via the Deep Space Network complex in Spain telling Spirit to begin transmitting.

Spirit stopped sending scientific and engineering health data on Wednesday, then missed several scheduled communications sessions. A heart beat "beep" was received yesterday confirming at Spirit could hear Earth and responded with the simple tone. A signal was also detected earlier this morning, prior to the retrieval of data.

[Schummacherr]

chissà cosa s'è bevuto sto spirit

[gpc]

Non è mica piccolo comunque 'sto gingillo...

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...sTestJan13.mpg

[gpc]

ops, doppio, scusate, il forum stava andando peggio dello Spirit

[GioFX]

Originariamente inviato da gpc
Non è mica piccolo comunque 'sto gingillo...

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...sTestJan13.mpg

infatti pensa che pesa 186 kg, contro i miseri 10,6 kg di Sojourner (il rover nella missione Mars Pathfinder)...

[teogros]

Originariamente inviato da GioFX
infatti pensa che pesa 186 kg, contro i miseri 10,6 kg di Sojourner (il rover nella missione Mars Pathfinder)...

Quasi 20 volte tanto!

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1700 GMT (12:00 p.m. EST)

Teams are still analyzing the information received from the Spirit rover this morning, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory says. A news conference with project officials to provide a status report on recovery operations is scheduled for 1 p.m. EST today.

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Spirit News Briefing, alle 10:00 am PST (1 pm EST, 19 ora locale italiana) su NASA TV.

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1807 GMT (1:07 p.m. EST)

At the news conference underway right now, project manager Pete Theisinger says that the data received from Spirit this morning indicates that the rover's flight software is "not behaving normally."

An anomaly team has been formed to continue gathering data from the rover and narrow the possible causes of the situation.

Theisinger says the rover should be able to sustain its health for an indefinite amount of time. He also noted that restoring Spirit to normal operations could take a couple of weeks.

[Oaichehai]

traduzione?

[Spazius]

1807 GMT (1:07 p.m. EST)

alla conferenza stampa in corso ora il manager del progetto Pete Theisinger dice che i dati ricevuti dallo Spirit questa mattina indicano che il software di pilotaggio non si sta comportando normalmente.

Un team anomalo-per l'anomalia è stato creato per continuare ad acquisire informazioni dalla rover e trovare le possibili cause della situaazione.

Theisinger dice che la rover dovrebbe essere capace di sostenere la propria "salute" per un indefinito periodo di tempo.Ha anche fatto notare che ripristinare Spirit alle normali operazioni potrbbe impegnare un paio di settimane.

[Oaichehai]

grazie per la traduzione.

quindi spirit potrà andare avanti.....almeno questa dovrebbe essere la speranza a quanto pare....

[teogros]

Originariamente inviato da Oaichehai
grazie per la traduzione.

quindi spirit potrà andare avanti.....almeno questa dovrebbe essere la speranza a quanto pare....

Speriamo davvero!

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1855 GMT (1:55 p.m. EST)

Here is project manager Pete Theisinger's briefing to reporters from earlier this hour:

"We have been able to command Spirit and we have gotten limited data in return. The flight software is not behaving normally.

"I would like to go into some details of the chronology of events that have happened since I talked to you yesterday.

"When I left here yesterday there was preliminary indication that a request for an acknowledgement sent to the spacecraft at what would have been an emergency or fault command rate was received and acknowledged from the spacecraft -- and that was correct. The spacecraft did see us yesterday.

"We attempted to command the spacecraft to send us telemetry yesterday. We were very late in the day and on top of a UHF command session, and that command did not work for what we believe were those reasons.

"This morning, we sent an early beep to the spacecraft and did not get a response. As we were preparing to send a second, the spacecraft talked to us. We got very fractional frames and then moved very quickly to ask it to speak to us for 30 minutes at 120 bits per second. We got 20 minutes of transmission in that occasion, which was a single frame of engineering data repeated.

"Then we repeated that full sequence of events and we got about 15 minutes of engineering data at 120 bits per second where the frames were updated for 15 minutes and then for the second 15 minutes we had nothing but fill data.

"The spacecraft attempted a short communication window at the end of the day, which ended.

"The spacecraft has been in a processor reset loop of some type, mostly since Wednesday, we believe, where the processor wakes up, loads the flight software, uncovers a condition that would cause it to reset. But the processor doesn't do that immediately. It waits for a period of time -- at the beginning of the day it waits for 15 minutes twice and then for the rest of the day it waits for an hour -- and then it resets and comes back up.

"The indications we have on two occasions is that the thing that causes the reset is not always perceived to be the same. We are confused by that, but that's the facts as we presume them to be right now.

"We know that the sequence which began on Wednesday morning to do some calibration of one of the Mini-TES motors, that sequence did not run to completion. And we know that the spacecraft believes it is now in an X-band fault condition, which can be caused by a large number of things, but one of them could be the inability to move the high-gain antenna.

"If you recall, we did know as of 1 o'clock Mars Time on Wednesday that the spacecraft did not believe itself to be in a fault condition, although it could be having problems. We know that because we tried this beep at 31.25 (bits per second) that day and it worked. That's not a rate we would expect if the spacecraft thought it was a fault condition.

"The team is basically taking the data it had this morning, as collected, and moving forward and analyzing what they know and preparing a plan of action for tomorrow and for the days following. We believe, based upon everything we know right now, that we can sustain the current state of the spacecraft -- from a health standpoint -- for a substantial, perhaps indefinite amount of time. There is no indication that we have an imminent power problem or thermal issue. There's indications that (the spacecraft has) not been going to sleep at night like we expected -- that we have been up for a lot or most of both nights -- and we are looking at what things could cause that to take place.

"An anomaly team has been formed, completely separate from the Opportunity team. They will working a schedule that will look like 0500 Mars Time to about 1500 Mars Time. So they are going to synch up with the Spirit's day. So that means tonight they will be coming in about midnight. The first part of that will be kind of a re-examination of the data, whatever they have been able to collect and analyze in the period of time and kind of a go-forward plan for the day. They will be on consoles for the day and then there will be a post-day, couple-hour meeting of what they know and to work on theories.

"I expect this to go on in this mode for several days of talking to the spacecraft, gathering more data, winnowing out theories, testing those theories against spacecraft observables and continuing that process.

"I think we should expect that we will not be restoring functionality to Spirit for a significant period of time -- I think many days, perhaps a couple of weeks -- even in the best of circumstances, from what we see today.

"Now, we have Opportunity coming in tomorrow night. We have the lander passivation sequence is going to start running tonight. We have made the appropriate personnel and staffing adjustments to make sure we have completely severed the efforts and that we can sustain Opportunity's (entry, descent and landing).

"It is likely, depending upon what happens in the next 48 to 72 hours, that we may not continue the Opportunity impact-to-egress with the same pace and dispatch that we did on Spirit. It depends on if we can get Opportunity to a defined, sustainable state on the ground and we can continue to make progress against Spirit with those assets, we will likely do that and try and continue to make progress on Spirit to get it back to some level of functionality. That's a decision the project will make in consultation with management as we take the temperature of this thing over the next couple of days."

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1905 GMT (2:05 p.m. EST)

While engineers work to understand and fix Spirit's troubles, a team reconstructing the rover's entry, descent and landing has made great progress.

This "path" of Spirit's landing has left "marks" on Mars as seen by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor and Spirit's Descent Image Motion Estimation System camera.

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1930 GMT (2:30 p.m. EST)

During the question-and-answer portion of today's briefing, project manager Pete Theisinger gave this summary:

"The software is in X-band fault mode. We surmise it got there because of some problem with the high-gain antenna pointing, and that is why the second high-gain antenna pass on Wednesday did not work. It gives us a little bit of a tale-tell for what is going on with the processor now.

"But as I pointed out to you, the flight software is not functioning normally. The two times we have gone and communicated with the system, we have gotten different flight software behaviors. Therefore we do not have assurance the next time we go and ask for it we will get either one of those two behaviors or perhaps a third behavior.

"We are trying to look at those responses to determine 'ok, how come it's behaving that way? And how come when we boot up it doesn't get better?' Those are the kinds of questions we are raising at the moment.

"We have quite a bit of information but clearly not as much as you would like."

We will have a complete story wrapping up the news conference as soon as possible.

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1945 GMT (2:45 p.m. EST)

Pete Theisinger, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover project, says Spirit is in "critical condition" as it sits at Gusev Crater.

"We do not know to what extent we can restore functionality to the system because we don't know what's broke. We don't know what started this chain of events. I think, personally, that is a sequence of things. And we don't know, therefore, the consequences of that.

"I think it is difficult, at this very preliminary stage, to assume that we did not have some type of hardware event that caused this to start. Therefore, we don't know to what extent we can work around that hardware event and to what extent we can get the software to ignore that hardware event, if that is what we eventually have to do.

"So we have a long way to go here with the patient in 'intensive care.' But we have been able to establish that we can command it, and we have been able to establish that it can give us information, and we have been able to establish that the power system is good and we are thermally OK. Those are all very, very, very important pieces of information and state.

"We are a long, long, long way from being done here. But we do have serious problems and our ability to eventually work around them is unknown.

"I'm trying to tell you do not to expect a big sea change in either knowledge or theory in the next several days because this is a very complex problem and we have very limited visibility."

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Spirit remains in 'critical' condition

BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: January 23, 2004

The crippled Spirit rover remains in critical condition on the surface of Mars, engineers said today, the victim of ongoing electronic seizures that have caused its central computer to reboot itself more than 60 times over the past two days.


An artist's concept of Spirit sitting on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL

Engineers successfully coaxed the rover to beam back limited engineering data during two brief communications sessions and they were relieved to discover the spacecraft's power system was providing the necessary life support. But Spirit's state of mind was clearly - and unusually - different in both sessions, ruling out any simple explanations for what might have gone wrong.

"We have a serious problem," said project manager Pete Theisinger. "The fact that we've got a vehicle that we believe is stable for an extensive period of time will give us time to work that problem. We can command it to talk to us and even though we get perhaps limited information, we do get good information and that helps us work through the problem.

"I expect that we will get functionality back out of this rover. I think the chances that it will be perfect again, I would think, are not good. The chances that it will not work at all, I think are also low. I think we're somewhere in that broad middle and we need to understand the problem to find out exactly where we are."

Spirit went on the blink Wednesday as it was carrying out a procedure to calibrate drive motors used by its thermal emission spectrometer. Prior to that moment, everything was operating normally. But some event, possibly a hardware failure of some sort, threw the rover's electronic brain for a loop. Since then, the spacecraft has been in a state of limbo, responding in unusual fashion to anxious flight controllers.

"This morning, we sent an early beep to the spacecraft and did not get a response," Theisinger said. "As we were preparing to send a second, the spacecraft talked to us. We got very fractional frames and then moved very quickly to ask it to speak to us for 30 minutes at 120 bits per second. We got 20 minutes of transmission in that occasion, which was a single frame of engineering data repeated.

"Then we repeated that full sequence of events and we got about 15 minutes of engineering data at 120 bits per second where the frames were updated for 15 minutes and then for the second 15 minutes we had nothing but fill data."


Pete Theisinger, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover project. Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls

He said Spirit "has been in a processor reset loop of some type, mostly since Wednesday, we believe, where the processor wakes up, loads the flight software, uncovers a condition that would cause it to reset. But the processor doesn't do that immediately. It waits for a period of time - at the beginning of the day it waits for 15 minutes twice and then for the rest of the day it waits for an hour - and then it resets and comes back up."

Complicating the work to track down the problem, "the indications we have on two occasions is that the thing that causes the reset is not always perceived to be the same," Theisinger said. "We are confused by that, but that's the facts as we presume them to be right now."

The reset sequence, similar to repeatedly unplugging one's personal computer and forcing it to restart, began Wednesday morning on Mars when a calibration of the spectrometer motors ended prematurely. An anomaly team has been formed to study the telemetry and to decide what readings to request from Spirit to help narrow down the range of possible failures.

"I think we should expect that we will not be restoring functionality to Spirit for a significant period of time," Theisinger said, "I think many days, perhaps a couple of weeks, even in the best of circumstances, from what we see today."

In the meantime, he said, Spirit remains in "critical" condition.

"We do not know to what extent we can restore functionality to the system because we don't know what's broke," Theisinger said. "We don't know what started this chain of events and I think, personally, that it's a sequence of things, and we don't know, therefore, the consequences of that. I think its difficult at this very preliminary stage to assume we did not have some type of hardware event that caused this to start and therefore, we don't know to what extent we can work around that hardware event and to what extent we can get the software to ignore that hardware event if that's what we eventually have to do.

"We've got a long way to go here with the patient in intensive care. But we have been able to establish that we can command it, and we have been able to establish that it can give us information and we have been able to establish that the power system is good and we're thermally OK and those are all very, very important pieces of information.

"We are a long, long way from being done here, but we do have serious problems and our ability to eventually work around them is unknown. Do not expect a big sea change in either knowledge or theory in the next several days. This is a very complex problem."


This image from earlier in the week shows Spirit probing its first target rock, Adirondack. The rover's arm remains extended while controllers try to restore the craft to normal operations. Credit: NASA/JPL

Amid the troubleshooting, Spirit's twin - the Opportunity rover - remains on track to land early Sunday morning East Coast time on Meridiani Planum, a region on the other side of Mars where deposits of minerals that form in the presence of water have been detected. Theisinger said engineers do not believe Spirit's problem poses any generic risk to Opportunity, but he said the flight control team would be much more cautious in its daily operations to minimize the chances of a similar problem.

"It is likely, depending upon what happens in the next 48 to 72 hours, that we may not continue the Opportunity impact-to-egress with the same pace and dispatch that we did on Spirit," he said. "It depends on if we can get Opportunity to a defined, sustainable state on the ground and we can continue to make progress (with) Spirit. We will likely do that and try and continue to make progress on Spirit to get it back to some level of functionality. That's a decision the project will make in consultation with management as we take the temperature of this thing over the next couple of days."

So far, the only change for planned for Opportunity's descent is a decision to deploy its braking parachute at a slightly higher altitude than Spirit's to provide more of a safety margin.

In other developments, engineers today presented a dramatic animation of Spirit's landing based on actual telemetry from the spacecraft, showing how a sudden gust of wind forced small side-pointing rockets to fire at the last second to prevent the lander from slamming down at more than 50 mph.

The telemetry, collected earlier and subjected to complex analysis, also shows how the rover bounced across the floor of Gusev Crater before finally rolling to a stop.

Michael Malin, principal investigator of a high-resolution camera aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, unveiled a dramatic photograph showing Spirit, it's parachute and its heat shield resting on the surface of Mars. The remarkable photograph even shows several of Spirit's bounce marks in the martian soil.