On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 22:44:53 GMT, "JimO"
wrote:

JPL folks were much cheerier today, they have been successfully commanding
Spirit in a mode that avoids use of some of its memory modules -- 'Flash
memort' -- which is suspect. They call it 'cripple mode', in jest --
actually, they could run the rest of the mission at full capability this
way, if necessary, but they want to determine what event precipitated the
failure first.

Hopefully, some of this flash memory is still working, when Read Only
Memory (ROM) is not very good for storing picture in.

Anyway, it sounds to me like Spirit should be back trundling again
very soon, when simply not using the faulty memory should be an easy
thing to fix.

Removing the exact section of faulty memory from use, unless all of it
has gone, should be a touch more tricky, but nothing that any
competent coder could handle.

All this is way too suspect happening right before Opportunity arrived
and virtually fixed at the same time that it arrived. As if it was
planned or not, then this event would have generated a lot of extra
interest in this second landing.

Publicity for NASA right now would be quite important, which makes me
wonder if there was nothing really wrong with Spirit in the first
place.

Cardman
http://www.cardman.com
http://www.cardman.co.uk