It is spring at Gusev Crater on Mars, which would be good news for NASA’s Spirit Rover–except that Spirit, moving around after a long, hard winter, seems sporadically to have lost its mind.
Last Sunday, NASA says, the rover sent a signal confirming it had received its driving instructions for the day from earth, but when it next reported in, it had not moved.
That can happen for many reasons — it often has, in fact — but there was more going on. The rover had no recollection, if you will, of what it had been doing; it hadn’t recorded its main functions in its computer memory.