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Rover suffers anomaly on Martian surface
Mission managers report loss of data from Spirit
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3855168/
MSNBC staff and news service reports

Updated: 12:41 p.m. ET Jan. 22, 2004

An "anomaly" of an unknown nature cut off data transfer from the Spirit
rover on Mars, mission managers said Thursday.

The news came a day after NASA said the rover was out of contact because of
bad weather at a radar transmission site in Australia. On Thursday, project
manager Peter Theisinger told reporters at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
that the loss of data did not appear to be due to the weather, but due to a
"very serious anomaly on the vehicle."

Repeated attempts to contact the rover, using direct Earth links as well as
satellite relays on NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor, were
unsuccessful, he said.

"There is no one single fault that explains all the observables," Theisinger
said. Among the possibilities could be a software glitch that caused the
rover to reset itself, or a power surge, or a temperature-related hardware
failure, or perhaps even a cosmic-ray hit, he said.

He said Mars Global Surveyor did make contact with the Spirit rover's radio
during one pass, but the telemetry received contained no meaningful data.

"It was sending a random pattern of zeroes and ones," deputy project manager
Richard Cook said. "What it means is that the radio was on but the computer
wasn't sending information over to it."

Toward the end of Thursday's news briefing, Theisinger passed along word
that managers had received a preliminary signal indicating Spirit was still
functioning on the Martian surface. If confirmed, that would mean the rover
had detected what it thought was a software fault.

The anomaly was a surprising twist in Spirit's mission, coming less than
three weeks after its landing.

Spirit landed on Mars Jan. 3 on a two-pronged, $820 million mission to find
out whether the now-dry planet was wetter and hospitable to life long ago.
Spirit's twin, Opportunity, is scheduled to land on Mars on Saturday.