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Mission to Mars
Aired January 26, 2004 - 14:15 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's talk about Spirit for just a moment. A lot of progress has been made on getting Spirit back up and running.
Joining to us talk a little bit about it is the mission manager for Spirit, Jennifer Trosper, who is getting absolutely no sleep whatsoever, so we appreciate you being here.
Jennifer, the thinking right now -- and you've actually been doing some simulations with a full-up model of the Spirit here at the jet propulsion lab -- is that potentially, you've saturated the memory. How did that happen?
JENNIFER TROSPER, NASA ENGINEER: We actually think -- we have space in our memory to add more volume of data, and we have space in our memory to add more numbers of data products. But the limitation is actually not with our nonvolatile memory, our flash. It's actually with our volatile memory, our RAM, and how much of that it takes to manage the nonvolatile memory, and so it's a little bit of a different problem.
And what we found is that the limitation we thought we had was not the correct limitation. And now we figured out what the limitation really is in terms of the number of files.
O'BRIEN: And it's worth reminding people, we're talking about files that have been building up since launch, right?
TROSPER: Yes, we do simulated tests, and we try to do the best we can to load the system like it will see in operations. But we launched in June, and we've been building these files up for that amount of time, so over 7 1/2 months. And we haven't been able to simulate that in our test environment accurately enough.
O'BRIEN: And but you have been able to recreate the crash that you've been seeing on the planet, which is very significant.
TROSPER: It is significant. In fact, about 10 minutes ago, in our test bed here, which is just like the rover -- it's a flight like rover -- we actually went ahead and caused the problem to happen and looked at the results of causing that problem to happen, and it looks very similar to the problem we're seeing on Spirit.
O'BRIEN: So to fix, it's just a matter of deleting files?
TROSPER: Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. But in the end, we delete the files. O'BRIEN: All right, Jennifer Trosper, I guess that bodes well. Possibly we'll have a rover that is 100 percent back to normal, which a few days ago, no one would have predicted here.
Thank you very much for being with us. Good luck as you clear out those files. And it's probably a little bit of words to the wise for you at home. Take a moment now, think about Spirit, and clear out some old files in your computer.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired January 26, 2004 - 14:15 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's talk about Spirit for just a moment. A lot of progress has been made on getting Spirit back up and running.
Joining to us talk a little bit about it is the mission manager for Spirit, Jennifer Trosper, who is getting absolutely no sleep whatsoever, so we appreciate you being here.
Jennifer, the thinking right now -- and you've actually been doing some simulations with a full-up model of the Spirit here at the jet propulsion lab -- is that potentially, you've saturated the memory. How did that happen?
JENNIFER TROSPER, NASA ENGINEER: We actually think -- we have space in our memory to add more volume of data, and we have space in our memory to add more numbers of data products. But the limitation is actually not with our nonvolatile memory, our flash. It's actually with our volatile memory, our RAM, and how much of that it takes to manage the nonvolatile memory, and so it's a little bit of a different problem.
And what we found is that the limitation we thought we had was not the correct limitation. And now we figured out what the limitation really is in terms of the number of files.
O'BRIEN: And it's worth reminding people, we're talking about files that have been building up since launch, right?
TROSPER: Yes, we do simulated tests, and we try to do the best we can to load the system like it will see in operations. But we launched in June, and we've been building these files up for that amount of time, so over 7 1/2 months. And we haven't been able to simulate that in our test environment accurately enough.
O'BRIEN: And but you have been able to recreate the crash that you've been seeing on the planet, which is very significant.
TROSPER: It is significant. In fact, about 10 minutes ago, in our test bed here, which is just like the rover -- it's a flight like rover -- we actually went ahead and caused the problem to happen and looked at the results of causing that problem to happen, and it looks very similar to the problem we're seeing on Spirit.
O'BRIEN: So to fix, it's just a matter of deleting files?
TROSPER: Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. But in the end, we delete the files. O'BRIEN: All right, Jennifer Trosper, I guess that bodes well. Possibly we'll have a rover that is 100 percent back to normal, which a few days ago, no one would have predicted here.
Thank you very much for being with us. Good luck as you clear out those files. And it's probably a little bit of words to the wise for you at home. Take a moment now, think about Spirit, and clear out some old files in your computer.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
