Bruce Palmer wrote in
. net:

Check the status page at
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.html
Search the page for "heater" and you will find the section. It's near
the bottom of the page.

Thanks. These problems always make me very nervous, because my initial
feeling is that they sound like hardware problems. In this case, it sounds
like a short circuit that bypasses the switch (or just a broken switch)
upstream of the heater load. Of course, that's just my gut feeling, and
I've never seen the schematics. But if the only repair option we have is
to remotely reprogram the rovers, the only thing you can do is to stop
using the parts that had the hardware failures.

Yes, I know I'm just being paranoid, and the Spirit team really did a bang
up job getting that breakdown fixed. I hope that they can do as well with
this one. Three cheers for the software guys! Hip, hip...