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.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
RSS