[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hi this is Jeff Fabretto with the September 15th Flight Director report for both Spirit and Opportunity. Both vehicles are in good health and we haven’t been reporting recently because we’re in an area of time called conjunction. And this is basicly when we have the Sun in the centre, Earth is on one side and Mars is on the other side of the Sun and that’s kind of a straight line. And so when we’re in this position it’s very difficult for us to communicate with Mars. We have to kind of go through the Sun and past the Sun or real close to the Sun with our radio signals which creates a lot of noise. So we kinda miss about 60 percent of our signal. And we can only look at a very small amount of information at this point in time. We’ll be getting out of this conjunction as Mars swings around and we see it a little bit better in a few days.

However today we had an interesting day. One of the spacecraft, MER-B, that’s Opportunity, it had reboot it’s software. We got a little bit of an indication that we saw that. We got enough information that we knew that it had reboot. And apparently there’s a software issue where a buffer overflowed, filled up, and created this software to reboot. Now, both spacecraft are autonomous in nature, they can deal with these things very effectively. When a spacecraft sees that it needs to reboot its software, it says to itself: Hmm, I reboot, but what I wanna continue to do is I wanna continue to regulate my power and I’m gonna continue to regulate communicationswindows and so wakes up when it needs to call back to Earth and it wakes up when it sees that the Sun is shining and it recharges its batteries and it takes care of itself. It just won’t do any of the science activities that we wanted to do during these types of anomalies.

Other than that, both spacecraft are great. We’re not doing a lot of science these days anyway because we can’t get a lot of data back to Earth right now. And we’re hoping to see these wake up in the next couple of days and then we’ll take control of them again.

And that’s the Flight Director report for September 15th 2004.