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RE: NASA is back on track to colonize the moon, by destroying some grains of moon material brought back by Apollo 17.
I also love solar power, and I am building a full system for my homestead.
The problem was that the rover was stuck in a sand storm for over two weeks, and her onboard battery died. When sun returned, she undoubtedly recharged; but no longer knew where Earth was due to memory loss. Further communications are no longer possible without antenna alignment reprogramming.
She was a tough little rover that was supposed to only run for 90 days, and she hung in a little longer, LOL!
I wrote on herr about a year ago, a salute to a heroic little robot! They got weather data that changed some of the colony planning from this little beast. We really got our monies worth from this mission!
She should be recovered and placed in the first Martian Museum.
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Did you say she is still moving around on Mars but that we are not receiving a signal from the Mars Rover any longer? So, the memory was lost because it was not powered for the two weeks? Don't they have external hard drives that can retain memory like a DVD or how long can drives last without power? Did the sand storm create an EMP or something that would shock the memory? Did her program not have a if-then protocol for what to do if there are storms? Did she have the ability to scan the weather in order to attempt to run away from storms or to dig a hole and turn off to wait the storm out?
Likely she is moving again. Without the exact location of the Planet Earth, she can no longer point her antennae to report in. That storm was a long duration problem, and the reboot would go back to her original programming from a decade plus before.
She would "loose" Earth, having moved way past her originally intended location and mission time. A hard drive would be fine, as long as the seal was intact.
Storm covered a third of the planet, couldn't out run it. They should have used the watchdog timer to reactivate the processor after a hard shutdown; to save power. They could have doubled the memory retention time that way.
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