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2004-01-31 Home Front

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Posted by Steve White 2004-01-31 12:55:33 AM|| || Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 I'm wondering about the Spirit. The report that it's operators here on terra firma were able to get it going again by deleting 1,700 files and rebooting sounds suspiciously like a Windows operating system fix. I certainly hope we did better than send the robot explorer out with a MicroSoft operating system.

Posted by Rivrdog 2004-1-31 1:06:52 AM|| 2004-1-31 1:06:52 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 Sounds suspiciously like a MicroSchlock O/S crashed. Anyone have more info on this?

Posted by phil_b 2004-1-31 1:26:12 AM|| 2004-1-31 1:26:12 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 Sorry to spoil the dream, but the rovers are running an real-time OS called VxWorks that's specially designed for this kind of application. Details here .

Posted by snellenr 2004-1-31 1:49:20 AM|| 2004-1-31 1:49:20 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 My understanding is that these old files essentially choked the flash drive. That somehow, NASA, or the OS, did not offload or delete them sooner, which caused the problem.

Posted by Ben 2004-1-31 4:44:43 AM|| 2004-1-31 4:44:43 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 Well, I've heard that an aircraft carrier was paralyzed by its Windows NT system lockup, and that the upcoming (but already superseded) land Warrior program used Windows CE ...

Posted by Lu Baihu 2004-1-31 1:39:36 PM|| 2004-1-31 1:39:36 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 I have a friend on the rover program and this is what he told me it was.

The problem seemed to be that the programmer decided to throw a FATAL_ERROR when the flash file system was full. JPL never tested the system long enogh to fill up flash. When this error is sent it reboots the system. So when the system comes back up it does it again... you get an infinite loop of rebooting.

Since the reboot took a lot of power, it would eventually go into a low power mode.

Luckily enough, when the system went into low power mode, it would accept commands. So therefore they could clear the file system.

Yep, the NT battle ship caused the end of two careers, NT on line ships and the admiral in charge.

Posted by Capt Joe 2004-1-31 7:10:03 PM|| 2004-1-31 7:10:03 PM|| Front Page Top

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