Spirit Mars rover experiences glitches

The Mars rover Spirit may be running as soon as this weekend, but the U.S. space agency say it’s puzzled about what caused the glitch that halted the rover.

Spirit did not move as instructed Sunday and failed to keep the data recording of its actions, The New York Times reported Friday. Data files are usually written to the rover’s flash memory, which stores information even after power is turned off.

The best guess of NASA engineers is that Spirit slipped into cripple mode, in which the rover writes data to random access memory, causing the bits and bytes to disappear when the rover powered down after trying to execute instructions.

Spirit is doing pretty good, as a matter of fact, R. William Nelson, head of the engineering team for Spirit and Opportunity, the other Mars rover, told the Times. It’s all very mysterious at this point, and we may never find out what happened.

Engineers said they were looking into another apparently unrelated, hiccup. The rover thinks the sun’s position is 4 degrees different than the actual position. An analysis ruled out a camera problem and engineers said they think the culprit may be the rover’s gyroscopes.