100 Million Mile (plus) Network-- FOR REAL!
Straight_Man
Geeky, in my own wayNaples, FL Icrontian
How do you fix a robot lander\explorer on Mars from Earth??? Well, NASA has a redundant-pipe 1Mbit\sec network going, from here to Mars. And, they managed to fix Spirit, remotely, as the problem turned out to be flash memory storage filled up to capacity. And the mistake that caused the silence and what is now known to be a 30 minute run and reboot loop simply was not to give the custom Linux O\S put in the robot the scripts to clean the flash memory every once in awhile and delete what had accumulated after it had been sent to earth and receipted for. Robot happily sent, then kept everything also. Now it does not, and it is back to work, along with its companion of sorts, Opportunity (another robot, working on another part of Mars).
Only reason I am not giving a link here, is that there is one in the News Submission queue to a real kicking story with an introduction and how to get a copy with pics as an acrobat reader file. If it gets posted onsite in news, here is a thread starter for it....
It went here as Communications and persistence were key to fix, and a redundant Neworking structure that was built up very carefully before Spirit was even launched. The story tells about the network, how it was used, and how the fix was accomplished using it.
John D.
Only reason I am not giving a link here, is that there is one in the News Submission queue to a real kicking story with an introduction and how to get a copy with pics as an acrobat reader file. If it gets posted onsite in news, here is a thread starter for it....
It went here as Communications and persistence were key to fix, and a redundant Neworking structure that was built up very carefully before Spirit was even launched. The story tells about the network, how it was used, and how the fix was accomplished using it.
John D.
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