On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Ranga Nathan wrote: > News: > Spirit's Troubled Memory > . > First Mars rover went into cycle of reboots after memory failure.
Nope, it's running the VxWorks realtime OS. Windows, Wind River -- whatever. The best explanation I've read suggests that the reboots could be happening because the computer is designed to power itself down whenever there is a power underflow as a protection mechanism. Maybe the solar panels aren't drawing as much power as expected; maybe some of the equipment is drawing more power than expected. In any case, the system boots, systems start coming online, then a threshold is crossed and there isn't enough electricity to go around, so the fault-detection subsystem tells everything to shut down. Lather, rinse repeat... But no, not a Windows problem this time around. From what I can tell, all the space craft run some RTOS like VxWorks or QNX, and all the earth-based controller machines run Linux. -- Chris Devers _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
