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Over five years ago this month, the two NASA rovers—Opportunity and Spirit—began what was planned as a 90-day journey on Mars to investigate the surroundings. Beyond everyone's hopes and dreams they have made this small journey into one that has surpassed NASA's expectations. But quite recently, the little rover Spirit had begun to exhibit some unusual behavior that had its engineers questioning what it is doing. The other rover, Opportunity, has shown no problems and is on its way to the monster crater Endeavour on the other side of Mars.

Gathering its energy on its solar panels from the sun, the rover Spirit had been enjoying spring right now at the Martian Gusev Crater, a time of re-energizing. Except for one small problem--the engineers and controller team for Spirit had been wondering if the little rover had sporadically lost its mind. Apparently it failed to report to Earth and its engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, over a week ago, which instantly prompted a series of diagnostic tests to hunt out the problem. Not only had it failed to send home a record of its week-end activities, it failed to record any of its actions on the Sunday.  

UP AND RUNNING

Due to NASA's diagnostic testings, what has been discovered is that Spirit may have been hit by a cosmic ray which has caused her to lose some of her memory on a sporadic basis. Being zapped by a charged particle which sidelined the rover for a couple of days was nothing to sneeze at, detected and reported by motor controllers so Spirit could stop safely in time before any damage was done. The area which was zapped was Spirit's mast, which held her Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer, Panoramic Cameras, and the Navigation Cameras. This caused Spirit to have a Panoramic Mast Assembly error, due to a Single-Event Upset (SEU). Her memory loss and damage was caused by the whizzing of a charged particle through the rover's transistor, flipping it inside her. But the good news is the Spirit was up and running the following Saturday, even though she was unable to travel very far because of getting stuck on a partially buried rock.

MISSION OF THE ROVERS

Both rovers are considered part of an ongoing mission that was designed to explore Mars, with the 2003 mission lasting longer than originally planned. Their primary mission was to search for and characterize clues to any water activity on Mars, within a wide range of rocks and soils. Part of the NASA Mars Exploration Program, the mission had three successful previous landers: in 1976 the two Viking landers and in 1997, the Pathfinder. The original 90-day mission was to cost approximately $820 million dollars, and now its funding has been extended to possibly through 2009—managed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA field center located in Arroyo Seco, near Los Angeles, California.

A Federally funded research and development center, the JPL is managed by the California Institute of Technology for NASA, with its primary function as construction and operation of robotic planetary spacecraft while conducting also Earth-orbit and astronomy missions. The JPL is also responsible for operating NASA's Deep Space Network with the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, in addition to the two rovers.