Wall-Es friend in trouble

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NASAs Spirit seems to be dying of natural causes.

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, a teensy little robot named Spirit, of the Exploration Rover kind of NASA, landed on a distant planet called Mars, where it was supposed to find answers to the question: “Why is there water on Mars?”

Spirit, one of two rover robots sent to Mars by NASA in 2003, seems to be giving some trouble due to old age, reports say.

Previous trouble included a wonky wheel. Now one of Spirit‘s latest age aches is forgetfulness, or as one NASA official called it, “amnesia”.

Spirit, after receiving its daily driving directions last Sunday, simply didn’t move, said John Callas, manager of the rover program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. Did it forget what is was supposed to do?

NASA said the incident didn’t come as a complete surprise, and pointed out that a number of reasons exist for the robot’s refusal to do what it’s paid to do.

Spirit is a sun-powered vehicle, which means if it wasn’t properly in line with the giant fireball, it could cause the robot to “relax” for a while.

Rover drivers have in the past figured out solutions to any of the problems mentioned above. This experience led them to guess the problem to be bad positioning.

They ordered the vehicle to locate the sun via camera, after which the robot reported back that the sun was nowhere to be found, or more accurately, it could not locate the position of the sun.

On Tuesday, Spirit finally reported that it had found the sun, but in a location not expected by the scientists. Callas said that they investigated “whether it’s the gyros or a camera problem.”

What is especially strange is that Sunday’s activities were not recorded by Spirit. This is very unusual, since the robot makes use of a nonvolatile memory, which is active even if other systems are not, or even if all other systems are shut down.

This is what led Callas to refer to the problem as a bout of “amnesia” of 90 minutes. Callas said that these various issues were, however, not linked.

Even though scientists cannot find an explanation of what happened with Spirit, it is reported that the little robot is back to good health, and responding to ground control commands.