I don't know if this has been posted anywhere, but I just read in a local newspaper that the Rover's problem was the hard drive was full. It only has 256 megabytes of space which filled up along its 6-month journey. I wonder if they will have the same problem with the Opportunity? I imagine they will already prevent it from happening if they have found out this is the probelm for Rover.

Why the frick would they only have a 256 meg drive on that thing!? That's nothing! Are you sure that wasn't memory, not hard drive space? And if it was memory, it wouldn't get filled up because memory keeps refreshing itsself. There's no way NASA would be dumb enough to put in a 256 meg hard drive. Maybe a 200 gig or something, but at least a gig.

Seeing as you can't get a 256 meg hard drive anymore.

I would have to imagine that for the money they put into that thing it has well over a gig of ram and probably a few hungred gig of hard drive space. Seeing as joe schmoe can buy a 200-300 gig hard drive, I would figure NASA should be able to afford that kind of technology.

Check the next paper to see if that was an error.

My bad, I must of read too fast. It only has 256 RAM which is apparently not enough. I'll post the article in a few minutes.

Jeeze, 256 megs of memory is pretty low. If that's true, what were they thinking?

I think it was 256MB of flash memory, like digital cameras or MP3 players use.

PASADENA, Calif. - The malfunctioning of NASA's Spirit rover on Mars apparently was caused by a memory shortage that sent the craft into an endless cycle of computer reboots, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Monday.

Like an underpowered home PC, Spirit does not have enough random access memory, or RAM, to juggle the massive number of data files it accumulated during its flight to Mars.

The rover's on-board computer has 256 megabytes of flash memory, which is like the memory cards in a digital camera. This memory is retained when the computer shuts down. It also has 128 megabytes of RAM, which is used for temporarily storing data and managing the operations of the computer. RAM is erased when the comuter shuts down.

Although a home computer would simply run very slowly, the file management problem in Spirit caused it to reboot repeatedly, a process it carried out more than 130 times before mission controllers regained control of the craft overnight Friday.

To free memory spcae, the JPL team is doing what a home computer user would do - deleting files, beginning with the hundreds accumulated during the craft's seven-month journey to the Red Planet, said mission manager Jennifer Trosper. Spirit landed on Maars on Jan 3.

"The patient is in rehab and we are nursing her back to health," she said.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Mars, the rover Opportunity continued the process of establishing itself on the Martian surface, unlimbering its mast, taking some pictures for the folks back home, and orienting itself in its surroundings.

"We couldn't be more happy with what we are seeing at this landing site," said Jim Bell of Cornell University, who developed the high defintion cameras used by the rovers. "This is a pretty spectacular landing site."

Edit: So you can see, I did mis-read, and the problem rests in the RAM (if you can't figure this out yourself, I don't know what to say...) Sorry for the mis-information from the start.

[Edited on 27-1-2004 by pyxsul]

Not only what were they thinking, but why was the damn thing so expensive???????

The kind of tax payer money they are sinking into this crap you think the technology would be better.

My walkman has more damn memory than that for crying out loud.

Yeah, the amount of money they spent you think they could atleast add top-of-the-line computer specs to it, such as a couple 240 GB hard drives, few gigs of RAM, and so on.