Spirit (Mars Rover) Sol 18 Anomaly

Lesson for engineers: build lots and lots of debugging hooks and panic buttons into your systems. You'll need them.

I find it interesting that the initial problem amounted to what was basically a memory leak. It affects Martian rovers just as much as Firefox!

I also find it amazing that as of now, the Mars rovers have been working for over 2000 sols. For what was initially supposed to be a 90-day mission. When the blog post was written, they were at 937 sols and the author thought that was long.

Just thought I'd point out (as a departing JPL intern...) that Spirit just reached sol 2000 on Tuesday, more than five years after its original 90 sol mission.

Even though it is still stuck (Free Spirit!), it's still performing useful science, as is its twin Opportunity on the other side of the planet. Great rovers and a great team at JPL who build and keep them running. I can't wait to see MSL touch down in a couple years.

This reminds me of yesterday, when I accidental left a stray : in my /etc/sudoers file and exited my editor. Couldn't get root access! Thanked the developers who invented recovery mode so I could fix my dumb mistake.