Mission Controllers Revive Spirit’s Memory

NASA’s Spirit rover is alive and well -- and back to work on Mars, mission controllers said Monday.

“Spirit made incredible progress over the weekend,” said mission manager Jennifer Trosper. “Today we are doing science on Spirit. She is back to the state she was in on Day One.”

Halfway around Mars, Spirit’s twin, Opportunity, sent back its first full-color panorama of the small crater it landed in on Jan. 24 and deployed its instrument arm to begin looking at the soil more closely.

Both rovers are expected to begin moving around the Martian surface later this week. Spirit will spend two or three days examining the football-sized rock called Adirondack before doing so, while Opportunity will spend a similar amount of time studying the soil before it heads toward a rock outcrop that has fascinated geologists.

Over the weekend, the instruments on Opportunity confirmed that the soil at its Meridiani Planum landing site contains the iron-bearing mineral hematite, which was why the craft was sent there in the first place. Hematite is most often formed in the presence of water, and preliminary data from the rover hint that the soil contains minerals that would also have been formed in that process.

A close look with the sophisticated instruments on the rover’s arm may confirm those hints. If water once existed on the Martian surface in large quantities, then, scientists believe, it is possible that there once was life there as well.

“This is just [such] an amazing site that we are still trying to figure out,” said geologist Jeff Johnson of the U.S. Geological Survey, a member of the mission’s science team.

Spirit, which landed on Mars Jan. 3 in Gusev Crater, had been out of operation for about a week and a half because of a malfunction in its onboard computer that caused it to continually re-boot, preventing the craft from transmitting data back to Earth.

Trosper said that studies over the weekend confirmed that the computer did not have enough random access memory to handle the large number of files that had built up in its flash memory, which is used for storage of data before they are transmitted to Earth.

The team deleted more than 1,700 files from the flash memory, which seemed to cure the problem. The team had planned to wipe the flash memory clean and reformat it over the weekend, but decided to wait until the accumulated scientific data it carried could be transmitted back to Earth.

Trosper said the flash memory would be reformatted Monday or today.

Engineers have already deleted a similar number of files from Opportunity’s memory to forestall similar problems with that craft.