Spirit (Mars Rover) Sol 18 Anomaly

Lesson for engineers: build lots and lots of debugging hooks and panic buttons into your systems. You'll need them.<p>I find it interesting that the initial problem amounted to what was basically a memory leak. It affects Martian rovers just as much as Firefox!<p>I also find it amazing that as of now, the Mars rovers have been working for over 2000 sols. For what was initially supposed to be a 90-day mission. When the blog post was written, they were at 937 sols and the author thought <i>that</i> was long.

Just thought I'd point out (as a departing JPL intern...) that Spirit just reached sol 2000 on Tuesday, more than five years after its original 90 sol mission.<p>Even though it is still stuck (Free Spirit!), it's still performing useful science, as is its twin Opportunity on the other side of the planet. Great rovers and a great team at JPL who build and keep them running. I can't wait to see MSL touch down in a couple years.

This reminds me of yesterday, when I accidental left a stray : in my /etc/sudoers file and exited my editor. Couldn't get root access! Thanked the developers who invented recovery mode so I could fix my dumb mistake.