Originally published February 2 2004
NASA design process for Mars rover suffers from serious lack of quality
control
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The more I learn about the Mars rover, the less faith I have in NASA.
Apparently, nobody at NASA actually tested what would happen if the
Spirit rover started taking pictures and storing them in its flash RAM.
After landing on the red planet, the rover started doing its job (taking
pictures) and within just a couple of days, the flash RAM was
overstuffed with data and the system just kept rebooting. It turns
out the flash RAM wasn't damaged at all. This was purely a design
error by people who apparently never thought to try out Spirit in,
say, some desert on planet Earth to see what might happen. Unless I'm
getting inaccurate information about all this, I can only conclude that
the Spirit rover design team suffers from a serious lack of quality
control and product testing. Not even a toy manufacturer would put a
product on the shelves at Wal-Mart without doing more testing than the
$820 million Spirit rover apparently went through.
The system
uncontrollably reboots when the flash RAM gets full? Who in their right
mind designed this thing? Look, I have a team of engineers at Arial
Software right now that could put together a far more reliable system
than the Mars rover, and probably for half the cost. And guess what: we
would actually test the thing before launching it.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is healthy again, the result of
recovery work by mission engineers since the robot developed
computer-memory and communications problems 10 days ago.
Spirit's twin, Opportunity, which drove off its lander platform early
Saturday, will be commanded tonight to reach out with its robot arm
early Monday, said JPL's Matt Wallace, mission manager.
For Spirit, part of the cure has been deleting thousands of files from
the rover's flash memory -- a type of rewritable electronic memory that
retains information even when power is off.
Each martian day, or "sol" lasts about 40 minutes longer than an Earth
day.
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