NASA engineers yesterday declared the crippled martian rover Spirit to be in "critical" condition and said the vehicle would likely remain idle for several days or even weeks.
Meanwhile, the scientists geared up for the landing of a second robotic explorer, Opportunity, on Mars this weekend on the other side of the planet from the troubled Spirit.
PHOTO: AP
And from another current mission to Mars, the all-European Mars Express, beamed back high resolution pictures of the planet's south pole that confirmed the presence of frozen water, showing there may be water in other parts of the planet.
Spirit, which had operated virtually problem free for its first 18 days on the red planet, has been out of commission since an abrupt, unexplained communications breakdown on Wednesday, less than a week after successfully rolling off its landing platform to begin searching for geologic signs of life-sustaining water.
Three brief transmissions received from the six-wheeled craft yesterday consisted mostly of error messages and limited engineering data, said mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who manage the Mars project for NASA.
For now, NASA engineers and scientists will be playing a sort of interplanetary game of 20 questions with the rover, as they attempt to send commands to the vehicle and gradually tease out electronic clues to what ails it.
"We should expect we will not be restoring functionality to Spirit for a significant amount of time, many days, perhaps two weeks, even in the best of circumstances," Mars Exploration Rover project manager Pete Theisinger told reporters at a JPL briefing.
He described the rover's condition as "critical," adding, "We do not know to what extent we can restore functionality to the system because we don't know what's broke ... We have a long way to go with the patient in intensive care."
Theisinger said that while the mission's flight software was malfunctioning -- plunging the rover into a continual "processor reset loop" -- he suspected that the root cause of the problem was some kind of hardware issue, such as a mechanical glitch or sensor flaw.
The problems began when the craft failed to finish carrying out a sequence of instructions to manipulate an instrument on the craft called the mini-thermal emission spectrometer, or "mini-TES," which is used measure the infrared emissions given off by rocks and soil to determine their mineral composition.
"We were doing a motor operation that did not run to completion when this thing started," he said. Since then, the craft appears to have rebooted its own onboard computer more than 60 times.
The good news, Theisinger said, was that Spirit was now responding to commands and sending some limited data back to Earth, an improvement over the mere beeps and random radio garble received earlier, giving engineers something to go on as they puzzle through the difficulty.
He said mission controllers should be able to "sustain the current state of the spacecraft from a health standpoint for an indefinite period of time."
He said he viewed the chances of restoring Spirit to perfect working order as "low," but likewise said it was unlikely that the rover would remain completely incapacitated.
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