Nasa Rover Breaks Down on Mars !!!!!

[Mike]

Nasa's Mars rover Spirit has stopped sending useful data to Earth from the Red Planet and mission scientists are unable to send it commands.
Nasa says the problem could either be due to a major power fault, software corruption or memory corruption.

Scientists has tried several times to communicate with the rover but has received either very little or no data.

The vehicle has entered a fault mode and Nasa is now devising a strategy for getting back in contact with Spirit.

"This is a serious problem. This is an extremely serious anomaly," said Pete Theisinger Spirit project manager.

"There is no single fault that explains all the observables."

At around 0430 GMT on Thursday, the Mars Global Surveyor probe received a signal from the rover suggesting that its radio was on.

But Spirit was only transmitting "pseudo-noise", a random series of zeroes and ones in binary code and not anything the scientists could decipher.

Deputy project manager Richard Cook said: "Effectively what it means is the radio was on but the computer wasn't sending information over to it."

On Wednesday, Nasa received two five-minute-long beeps or signals from the Rover on Mars that confirmed it had received commands from Earth.

But Nasa has not received data from the rover for more than 24 hours.

The scientists had reported a bad communications link on Wednesday when they tried to send commands to the rover. This meant that only part of the command reached the rover.

But this was initially put down to bad weather over a radio telescope in Canberra, Australia which was sending the signals to the Red Planet.

It now appears the problems could have had some other cause.

Scientists were asked whether the command being cut short could have caused the malfunction. But they consider this unlikely at present.

"We believe the architecture does not allow this to happen," said Mr Theisinger.

Mission scientists will now try to send commands to the rover to try to get it to respond.

Spirit's twin rover Opportunity is due to land on the surface of Mars on 25 January at 0530 GMT.