Blue screens on a red planet
Despite the technical sophistication of the project, the Spirit rover almost came to a halt because of a programming problem. The rover contains 128MB of DRAM memory and 256MB of flash memory, which is used to store images and the system's directory. Technicians on Earth would continually download images from flash. The directory, a map of the computer's files, however, did not update itself to acknowledge that files had been downloaded and deleted from the rover.
As a result, by sol 18, the computer on the Spirit rover was convinced that it had maxed out on memory. When new data was harvested, the rover would reboot itself. Suddenly, researchers on Earth could not obtain data from the rover, and the rover was dangerously running low on power because of all the energy sucked up by the reboots.
Researchers on Earth finally shut it down and created a utility to scrub out old files from the directory, which was based on DOS.
"The Spirit was willing, but the flash was weak," he said. "This was a feature of the DOS files system that we failed to accommodate."
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On Mars, no life yet, but plenty blue screens of death
