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Yes, Opportunity is an exact twin to Spirit, and will be landing and Meridiani Planum on the other side from Mars at midnight Sunday EST.Originally posted by Ergi
I've just found an article claining that a second probe called Opportunity is supposed to land on Mars tomorrow. I haven't heard about this before, so could anybody please tell me whether that information is correct?
-Chris Barnes
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I bet it was Elvis.PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - NASA (news - web sites) scientists on Thursday scrambled to find out what had gone wrong with the Mars rover Spirit after 24 hours of garbled communications and intermittent silence apparently caused by an unknown malfunction.
He mistook the rover for a Jack-in-the-Box drive-thru window and went ballistic!
LQ
Drunken DM and the Speak with Dead spell: "No, I'm not the limed-over skeleton of the abbot, and no this special key in my boney fingers does not open the door to the secret treasury! ... Oh crap."
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Fox New Channel reported this morning that NASA received a 10-minute communique from Spirit this morning. Engineers are poring through the data to see if there is any engineering info on the problem.
NASA is leaning toward a software problem, according to Fox.
Davy Jones
"Frightened? My dear, you are looking at a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe! I was petrified."
-- The Wizard of Oz
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I'm waiting for the day we get the big message from Mars:
"WE KEEP TELLING YOU TO GO AWAY BUT YOU WON'T LISTEN! YOU HAVE ONLY YOURSELVES TO BLAME"
BLAMMO!
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Rumours of the rover finding a little note saying "no milk for two weeks" have been greatly exaggerated.Originally posted by ComaBoy
I'm waiting for the day we get the big message from Mars:
"WE KEEP TELLING YOU TO GO AWAY BUT YOU WON'T LISTEN! YOU HAVE ONLY YOURSELVES TO BLAME"
BLAMMO!
We have all your working biros and we're not afraid to use them.
Leave a box of used postit notes and a box of paperclips inside the filling cabinet and things won't get nasty.
Yours,
The Office Gremlins
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Actually, the problem is that they used Windows 98 and have now gotten the Blue Screen of Death.
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ROTFLMAO!!!
Aaaghhh! The Blue Screen of Death!
So can NASA sue Microsoft?
Anyhoo, just some random thoughts...
"My philosophy is 'you don't need me to tell you how to play -- I'll just provide some rules and ideas to use and get out of your way.'"
-- Monte Cook
"Min/Maxing and munchkinism aren't problems with the game: they're problems with the players."
-- excerpt from Guardians of Order's Role-Playing Game Manifesto
A GENERATION KIKAIDA fan
DISCLAIMER: I Am Not A Lawyer
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Bummer. Perhaps they can figure out what the glitch was & patch it on Opportunity.Originally posted by Liz Not Beth
False news I'm afraid. Apparently they got it talking again at a basic level and it seems the computer is wrecked/damaged/unable to restart or somthing. Problem happend as they were trying to run a piece of scientific equipment. Now it's stuck in some kind of endless reload/reboot/reload loop.
"If it ain't the Devil's music, you ain't doin' it right" -- Chris Thomas King
"C makes for an awfully long lever." - H. Beam Piper
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Regarding the Opportunity, this is where NASA's press agency made a vast faux pas by claiming "The two rovers will be exact duplicates, but that's where the similarities end..."
"That might have been the biggest mistake of my life..."
"It is unlikely. I predict there is scope for even greater mistakes in the future given your obvious talent for them."
Vila and Orac, Blake's Seven
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This is what I found by chance a moment ago:
- real-time operating system (whatever that is) VxWorks of Wind River Systems
- 25 MHz PowerPC CPU
-128 MB RAM
“Worried? I’m scared to death. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them change the way I live my life.” - Joseph Sisko - Paradise Lost
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Spirit upgraded from "critical" to "serious."
NASA engineers found a work-around Saturday for the problems it was experiencing with the Mars rover Spirit, establishing communication with the vehicle and regaining the ability to control it.Spirit uses Flash memory to communicate with the flight software to establish a file structure and will shut itself down if the process is interrupted, Theisinger said. Engineers guessed that Spirit's troubles were in its Flash memory and set about sending the rover a complex series of instructions to see if they could get it to bypass the corrupted memory.
Theisinger said engineers sent Spirit a command just before its daily "waking up," telling it to shut down and restart in what is known as "cripple mode," using RAM instead of Flash for its start-up instructions.
"That is precisely what happened," Theisinger said, and Spirit then sent an hour's worth of data back to Pasadena.
"Something in the flight software talking to the Flash memory is causing us difficulty," Theisinger said.
"It's hard being an evil genius when everybody else is so stupid" -- Quantum Crook
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