The experience I’m about to relate marked the beginning of the end of my NASA work, the end of the beginning of my awakening. The transparent and noble institution I believed I knew was hiding something.

I was at JPL on a project when a colleague of mine in the unrelated MER program was working a Spirit glitch. Spirit is one of the two rovers still operating on Mars. Spirit’s expected mission was for a little over 90 days long, but six years later the rover is still operating. Spirit has performed well beyond expectations, but even the best robot is going to have its off days. One of these off days was in late January 2009. My friend and colleague, who I’ll call Rich, was a senior software engineer on the team tasked with maintaining the mobility flight software, the code that controlled the rover’s movements and experiments.

Spirit had refused an instruction. It had been sent instructions to move, it acknowledged receipt of those instructions, but it did not move. In and of itself that was not highly unusual, the rover is given license to ignore move requests it does not believe it can fulfill successfully or safely. But not only did Spirit not move, its non-volatile flash memory was missing data about its motionless hours. Through a separate subsystem they were able to estimate that it had been awake for at least an hour during the gap, but what it had been doing or why it had decided not to move was unknown. Imaging before and after the event showed no change, cameras, IDD, suspension values, terrain; all were the same. This was the mystery my colleague and his team were engaged in solving. Why did the rover ignore its command to move? Why did the rover record nothing? Presumably the one question would answer the other.