The DOS Bug That Almost Killed The Spirit Mars Rover

jfruh writes: "On January 21, 2004, the Spirit Mars rover, which had been cheerfully collecting data and sending it back to Earth for the two weeks since it had landed, suddenly ground to a halt. Mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were getting pings indicating that the rover was alive, but that was it. Over the next eleven days, the JPL team coaxed the rover back to life, eventually discovering that the heart of the problem lay in a DOS memory management bug interacting with insufficiently tested third-party code."

Not a "DOS bug"

[Megane]

TFA says "DOS-related" bug. The bug was in a FAT filesystem library. The only thing MS-DOS had to do with it was being the origin of the FAT filesystem.

Also, why now?

[Megane]

I can find no new information in the article. It seems it was only written because this was an anniversary of the landing. A ninth anniversary no less. Stale!

Information here ...

[Taco Cowboy]

TFA was written by someone who has no idea about computer

The info on the bug is as follow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_rover#Sol_17_.28January_21.2C_2004.29_flash_memory_management_anomaly [wikipedia.org]