Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon
Two tidbits of good-- nay, great-- news from Mars today:
1) Scientists seem to have confirmed the presence of water ice at the Martian south pole. Water, as you know, is one half of a scotch and water and therefore the midpoint towards confirming the existence of advanced Martian civilization.
2) Game on! This morning the pointy-heads at NASA got the first non-gibberish signals from the Spirit rover in two days. This is fantastic news, and we all of course hope that constant communication can be re-established. Although details are not forthcoming, reports suggest that the signal consisted of a query: "Where the f**c is Opportunity with the damn scotch?"
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Johno
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My guess is that there's a
My guess is that there's a succession of failovers going on...the Spirit is following a communications plan...if no commands or signals are heard from the surface for a certain amount of time, it begins to reboot/reinitialize parts of itself, one at a time, and try again.
It could be that the Spirit is _receiving_ just fine, but is having trouble sending. I'd sure like to know if the signal was sent by the normal antenna, or by some other backup antenna.
Maybe the damn thing just needs to reboot!
If I coded Spirit, I'd probably have it reboot itself when a certain amount of time goes by without being able to verify two-way comms...if cosmic rays or radiation or whatever have damaged the ROM it would reboot from, though, things can be really iffy...
Fantastic that there's some signs of life! Those guys are analyzing like crazy, right now...
Damn - and here I was ready
Damn - and here I was ready to insist it was the little martians that tampered with the rover...
You really think the Martians
You really think the Martians are going to allow us to invade their terrain? Fools! Yeah, and you probably believe that NASA's not doctoring those photos either, right?
They have eaten all the other
They have eaten all the other nation's probes and not ours; and I have always thought that this was proof that the Martians will spare us when they invade. Perhaps they were confused for a little bit with Spirit - and thought it was from some other country, but turned it back on once they realized their mistake.