PASADENA, Calif. – NASA awakened its Mars rover Spirit early Wednesday and started the delicate process of cleaning old files out of its memory to cure it of the problems that have delayed its search for signs that the planet was once a wetter place.
The process did not begin until after four days of tests.
”It’s not an operation that we do lightly,” Mark Adler, a deputy mission manager, said at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The six-wheeled vehicle was ordered to conserve power before being awakened. Two hours later it began the four-hour process of reformatting its flash memory, which involves erasing all the contents.
Scientists believe a buildup of too many files in the flash memory caused the rover to stop transmitting data back to Earth beginning Jan. 21. Spirit briefly resumed science operations earlier this week before NASA once again halted the work to finish correcting the memory problem.
The rover was expected to resume normal operations late Wednesday.On the other side of Mars, the twin rover Opportunity was readied for a little road trip. Its destination was a rock formation where instruments suggest there are higher concentrations of hematite – a mineral that can form in water – than had been found at its current site.
Geologic evidence of water would support the possibility that Mars once had life. The rovers have found intriguing geological data, but scientists remained cautious.
”With respect to extrapolating from a few grains of sand to a story about water on Mars – little hard to do at this point,” said Steven Squyres, the mission’s principal scientist.Spirit landed on Mars on Jan. 3, followed three weeks later by Opportunity.