2004 05 18, May 18th, 2004 Options

[djellison]

Hello, This is the Mars Exploration Rover Flight Director Report for May 18th 2004. I'm George Chen, Flight Director of MER-A Spirit.

Today is Sol 133 on MER A, we are back on the road again in our drive toward Columbia Hills, at least we hope so. Back on Sol 131 we had a spontanious reboot of the flight computer and further investigation revealed that this was due to a flight software task writing to an inadvertantly write protected area of memory and the Operating System didnt know how to deal with that so it rebooted the computer and put the spacecraft into a safe state and waited for further instructions from the ground. We've determined that the spacecraft is healthy and we can pretty much start to drive again. Flight Software Engineers have determined there was only a very small window of vulnerability when this error could have occured of about 3 microseconds, so it looks like we were pretty unlucky that this problem occured and we dont think it'll happen again.

On the other side of the planet we just completed sol 112 on Mer B - Opportunity. It was an unsuccesfull day today - we had a problem with the DSN antenna. It was not configured properly for the uplink so the spacecraft never recieved any instructions from the earth on what to do on Sol 112. So we have the problem squared away at the antenna so we're hopefull that tomorrow, Sol 113, we'll be back in business. However we're probably going to have to charge the battery for a little longer on Sol 113 because some of the action we were going to take on Sol 112 to reduce the energy consumption were unsuccesfull as well

And that's what's happening on Mars today.