NASA bids to solve Mars rover bugs

NASA scientists were today trying to coax their ailing rover Spirit back to health while its twin prepared to reach out to the Martian soil with its robotic arm for the first time.

The US space agency planned for Opportunity to begin flexing its instrument-laden arm today.

The six-wheeled rover rolled on to the Mars surface on Saturday, a week after landing halfway around Mars from its twin, Spirit, which touched down on January 3.

Scientists have seen a mineral called grey hematite in the soil at Opportunity’s landing site.

Preliminary evidence suggests the iron-rich mineral is of a variety that forms in water, providing the first evidence that the site was wetter and maybe hospitable to life long ago.

Meanwhile, Spirit was a week away from rolling on Mars again and the software problem vexing the spacecraft may threaten both it and Opportunity for the duration of their mission, NASA said.

Engineers deleted more files from Spirit’s flash memory but delayed until today reformatting it completely, giving them more time to diagnose the rover’s problems, mission manager Mark Adler said. NASA originally planned to perform the task on Saturday.

Once completed, Spirit should be able to leave the low-power mode it has been in and begin operating normally again, by tomorrow at the earliest.

“Then I think we can declare we are completely back in our normal mode,” Adler said. Low-power mode has restricted nighttime operations aboard the rover.

Engineers will have to keep on deleting computer files from Spirit’s flash memory to keep their numbers low enough for the rover’s random-access memory to manage.

They also may regularly reformat its flash memory, perhaps every week or two, Adler said. The same will be done for Opportunity.