MER Rovers disappointment so far..

"Julius Kilo" wrote in message
gy.com...
....
I second that. They have this expensive and incredible hardware safely on
the surface of Mars and are afraid to actually use it. Every press
conference is basically a teaser about how good it's gonna be real soon
now--after the engineers get done dicking around with studying ephemeral
motor current spikes and such. Oh, and the scientists can do their science
like the cleanup crew after a parade--like take a look at those airbag
marks, will ya? Cool huh? Incredible even. Study that.
I DO understand why they are "afraid" to "use" the expensive rovers -
think if YOU had to press the buttons (I'm sure that it's not a single
button!) to let one of the rovers egress - and the egress went wrong...
I'm sure that they do it step-by-step - and due to the distance from earth
to mars "a step" takes some minutes (30 minutes?) to complete.

Here's a good test for Opportunity: just drive it to that outcrop
for cripe sakes and test it on something real. CARPE SOL!!!
It's might be best to stay in the dark in order to cool the rover ;-)


Look at Spirit for a continuing case in point. They know they have a
corrupt
file system on the flash memory, but are so worried about losing the files
because they give the engineers something to chew on for maybe several
more
weeks to analyze what happened. So they're gonna try to get a stack trace,
or try to do minor surgery every day to save what they admit are not very
valuable or irreplacable data. Just reformat the ****er and get going!
Final
engineering report: it was hosed. OK, move on!
IMHO I think that they are afraid of losing control of the rover - It's
quite expensive to send a service rep to mars!
My rule of thumb - to fix SW problems - has always been to try to understand
it!
If you don't understand why your software behaves as it does - bug-fixing
always seems to introduce more errors than it solves! At least that seems to
be my experience.

Actually, it's getting slightly better. If Opportunity rolls off on
Sunday,
that will be a quicker egress than with Spirit.
Lets hope so!

---
Henrik