[Coco] rover

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/23/04 8:32:15 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
jadonaldson at charter.net writes:

>   News this morning seems to say they got comm with the
>  rover again. They were saying they sent commands for it to
>  send engineering data back.

They're probably still working intensely on debugging the system, looking for 
software bit-rot in RAM.  Many of us on the List can sympathize with someone 
doing such bug tracing -- but imagine what if, every command you typed had a 
20-minute delay before anything showed on your screen?  Of course NASA is using 
bulk data dumps, but you can imagine that "tracing" the code between 
"breakpoints" could burn up a few days.

I was relieved to find out that the radio hadn't gone out.  Supposedly, NASA 
can reboot the whole machine, sending the bytes of executable over the radio 
link, but that is a last resort.

Anyone know what CPUs the Rover uses, and whether the code was done in 
assembler or something higher-level?    --Mike K.