February 6
Jennifer Trosper: Spirit status, on Wednesday we spent 3 hours to erase the flash, and 1 hour later in the day to reformat and restart the vehicle. Nerve-racking but the craft did exactly what we needed it to do and is up and running in great health. After that we moved quickly to science. On Thursday, Spirit woke up at 9am, we got data down fist thing and then we commanded craft to use the RAT to brush the rock. We and placed Mossbauer and APXS on the rock overnight. Today we'll place the RAT on the rock and actually grind. Thanks to the people that have been in crisis mode. (listed team members). I want to show an image (image of the instrument cluster on the IDD). It took us a few days to get the testbed testing done and in those two days we downlinked several images that were in flash and for this image we actually posed the arm to get the flag (on the side of the RAT) in the image. Yesterday morning right after we played the Spirit wake-up song, "back in the saddle again" we played a second song, "the star spangled banner", and it reminded me that it's not just about this team of people, it's about every person out there across the country that has contributed, so we'd like to dedicate this image to the American people.
Glen (Reeves?): I actually had a day off yesterday, not in crisis mode and I'm proud of that :D The story of how we got from crisis to relief is the story of a lot of people. First I want to talk about what went wrong and how we fixed it, then I'll turn it over to science team. The first part of the problem was that as we accumulated more files, we consumed more memory and we eventually ran out. Problem 2 was that our reaction to that was rather severe, we corrupted the file system. To get out we needed to pull as much data out of the flash as possible and then reformat. Consuming all the memory is a severe error. The craft did what it was supposed to do and reset itself. The number of files caused us to again, on each initialization, consume the same amount of memory, hitting the problem, and again resetting. It was sol 18 when we first got an idea of what was going on. It took us a couple of days to begin to get data because of communications problems. Over about 3 days we concluded that the system was in this reset loop. We had fortunately built into the system a mode called cripple mode that allowed us to boot without the flash. We thought if we could get into that mode we could stabilize the vehicle. On sol 21 we got into cripple mode and we got communications control back so we could go in and debug. Drawback about debugging a system that far away, if you can imagine the slowest ISP, compared to communications with the rover, I love my ISP :-) During this time, the throughput is fairly low and the most critical part of our activity was to capitalize on every single time we talked to the vehicle. We extracted the absolute most information we could get every time we talked to it. Once we concluded we could keep the vehicle stable in cripple mode, we got to debugging. Our theories proved out and we established that the filesystem onboard was for the most part intact. On the 27th we actually started to use the filesystem again and started downlinking as much data as possible. The file system, though, appeared to be corrupted. This meant that the manner for resetting was going to be to erase all the flash and reformat. We've done that. We're back to the beginning, we've established the state of the system like this many times before. We have a fresh system and we have a procedure in place to work around this problem indefinitely. There are some suggestions to make changes to the flight software to identify the problem more quickly.
Stephen Gorevan: My expectation was to report on the first use of the RAT as a grinding too. Instead, the first time use of the RAT was to brush. In the science discussions over the last few sols it became clear that this capability was available to us. Adirondack looked to be clean but in case there was a cemented coating, we decided to take the brush to remove loose material and to preserve a cemented coating which could tell us something about the history of the rock. This image shows the RAT's stainless steel bristles called the rock brush. It's primary purpose was to remove the grindings from the hole after a RATting. Many of us didn't expect to see a difference. Here is Adirondack before the brushing. Here is the part we brushed. This is a big surprise. All I could think to say, like Mohamad Ali, "This is the greatest interplanetary brushing of all time" ;-) 5 minutes of brushing and we think we have preserved any cemented coating that existed below the dust.