Options
How to remote debug a mars lander
The mars lander Spirit landed, went silent for 15 minutes, then sent back a bunch of very good pictures of Mars. Then it sent a distress signal and appeared to die... Here's how a 100 Million Mile long network was used to remote debug the lander and fix what was wrong. The lander was programmed in such a way that the flash memory modules used for its storage memory overflowed. Here's the story of the most impressive remote fix in history.
[blockquote]Operators of this interplanetary signaling system send commands to and listen for data from "nodes" such as Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, using three facilities spaced roughly one-third of the way around Earth apart from each other. These communications complexes are in Goldstone, Calif.; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia.
...
During normal operations, the rovers communicate directly with Earth when receiving instructions or sending back diagnostic information. They send back the bulk of their scientific data and photographs by using NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor probes as relay stations. These unmanned craft orbit the red planet carrying cameras, high-gain and ultra-high-frequency (UHF) antennae along with other scientific instruments.
The omnidirectional mast antenna sticking up from each rover's top like a dorsal fin knows when to transmit by listening for a signal that one of the orbiters is passing overhead. The orbiter then uses its more-powerful antenna to send as many as one million bits of data per second back to Earth. While fairly fast for an attenuated radio connection, that's only about a tenth of the speed of a cable-modem connection for the average home-computer user.
[/blockquote][link=http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,3959,1519021,00.asp]Read more[/link] - Submitted by Ageek
[blockquote]Operators of this interplanetary signaling system send commands to and listen for data from "nodes" such as Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, using three facilities spaced roughly one-third of the way around Earth apart from each other. These communications complexes are in Goldstone, Calif.; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia.
...
During normal operations, the rovers communicate directly with Earth when receiving instructions or sending back diagnostic information. They send back the bulk of their scientific data and photographs by using NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor probes as relay stations. These unmanned craft orbit the red planet carrying cameras, high-gain and ultra-high-frequency (UHF) antennae along with other scientific instruments.
The omnidirectional mast antenna sticking up from each rover's top like a dorsal fin knows when to transmit by listening for a signal that one of the orbiters is passing overhead. The orbiter then uses its more-powerful antenna to send as many as one million bits of data per second back to Earth. While fairly fast for an attenuated radio connection, that's only about a tenth of the speed of a cable-modem connection for the average home-computer user.
[/blockquote][link=http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,3959,1519021,00.asp]Read more[/link] - Submitted by Ageek
0