Why I Left NASA: A Curiosity of Spirit

Originally posted by franspeakfree
My gut feeling is telling me this person is a creative writer and nothing more. This member will no doubt be researching the internet for more technical specs about the rover, then start installment 2.

I am watching you like a hawk OP and so are others, make sure your facts are up to date.

Im watching you like Ray Charles....

second line. im also listening to you like Helen Keller.

Originally posted by MMPI2

Originally posted by AstroEngineer


All were as expected except for regions of code related to telecom. Only portions of the RAM dumped version matched the EEPROM version. .....

He found some later regions which were, and this strongly suggested that either portions of the original code had been damaged or that the portions were simply different by design, representing a different (older or newer) version of the code. ....

Sure enough the code was different, and very oddly so. The code dumped from the rover included function calls referring to a device accessed via the VME interface (similar to a computer's PCI slot) which Rich did not know about.

(continued)

[edit on 28-3-2010 by AstroEngineer]

So, what...who cares?

look like someone other than Astro engineer and his buddy are not the only one's operating the rover

Just think of PC Anyware and the slot Vme interface has a different device that they do not know about I assume they don't stay there 24/7 is the rover used when they are away ? is there a device on the rover they do not know about way and above beyond top secret ? obviously some else bedside's Astro- and his buddy is controlling the rover with a different code that is not known to them

does this remind you of something ?? it does me ! Look up about the Pentium III and the serial to identify you ! as intel/Microsoft got caught red handed as some found in the code! of windows 98 using the Cpu chip by other means

some links to this ! for those who don't know or remember
www.davemathews.com...
www.cnn.com...
www.shmoo.com...
news.cnet.com...
wapedia.mobi...

from intel itself

www.intel.com...

so this was unknown until someone discovered the code in windows 98(using info and reporting to the company ) with the PIII with out your knowledge !

Astro and his Bud came a crossed with
sort a... the same way the found this out a different code from the data from a slot that they were unaware of ,from some unknown device that was in the slot



go back to sleep nothing to see here ! move along Honey when is gladiators coming on ! < Bill Hicks !

[edit on 29-3-2010 by Wolfenz]

[edit on 29-3-2010 by Wolfenz]

reply to post by mckyle


hahahaha!

Send that "Earth Dollar" into space tied to a "Red Balloon," so he knows it is from you.

The Red Ballon ( Le Balloon Rouge )
www.youtube.com...
Who remembers that?

[edit on 29-3-2010 by tooo many pills]

ASTRO ENGINEER

if you say were working for NASA and your BUDDY Rich >? Operated or involved with the Spirit Rover!!

do us a favor !

explain to us ( talk to your bud Rich) this whole ordeal of this thread !!!

Mars Rover Examines Weird Coating on Rocks
www.abovetopsecret.com...

and get back to us !!

[edit on 29-3-2010 by Wolfenz]

reply to post by AstroEngineer


Are you Richard C. Hoagland? Because your blog seems to advertise his book.

While your unfinished chunk of writing about the Spirit rover is a pretty believable read, Dick Hoagland is - in my own blunt opinion - a whimsical fool who consistently takes all the credibility out of the UFO phenomenon. The very fact that you have mentioned his name in your blog decreases your own credibility in my book. Nonetheless I'm interested to read the rest of what you have to say, though I'm not sure why you're treating this like some kind of cliff-hanger for a TV show. In the meantime I'll assume you are who you claim to be and I welcome you to ATS.

(I did not have time to read all previous comments or address issues raised. I will attempt to do so tomorrow.)

(continued from the first installment)

You work on a project like this and there is little about it which remains unfamiliar, so the apparent discovery of a device you didn't know was on board gets your attention. Rich's initial assumption was that this was entirely benign, he was sure it was a piece of vestigial code meant to connect to a device which the science or engineering teams had decided post software spec couldn't go to Mars. And despite best efforts, old code can sometimes reappear in deployed software. As separate developers merge their own changes back into a source tree, things can creep back in. If the leftover and unused code caused no problems in testing, then likely no one would notice and the code would be deployed. Rich checked the source code repository for any sign of this code in that application, in any earlier versions. Nothing. He then looked at the application's stack from the RAM dump and found evidence that several of the mysterious functions had actually been called. This code was not vestigial; there was assuredly some device on the VME bus with which the code was interacting. As he examined the decompiled code from Spirit, the decompiled official terrestrial EEPROM code, and the official checked-in source which compiled to the EEPROM he began to piece together how this code appeared to be used. It looked as if this code was executed when the telecom package was instructed to transmit data back to Earth. The raw, experimental data files on flash memory would be passed to this mystery code where they would then be sent to this mystery device. The image data from flash appeared to first be re-processed by the ICER (MER's image compression) library to drop the resolution before going to the mystery device; the images passed to the device were akin to thumbnails of the originals. This is where I got involved.

Rich and I had worked together quite a few times, and we'd even talked about opening up our own consulting business back in the dotcom days, when a private space race first seemed a possibility. He wanted me to confirm that what he was seeing was real, and he knew if I was able to show him it wasn't I'd do so without the harsh judgment that can make reaching out to others tricky. Years earlier he'd confided to me a UFO sighting he experienced while camping in Joshua Tree National Park. He didn't know what to make of the experience, and neither did I. I don't personally believe or have any knowledge that suggests UFOs are alien in origin, but neither do I have reason to disbelieve the very genuinely related and seemingly conventionally inexplicable experiences of a handful of friends and relatives. Maybe they were hallucinating, maybe they were mistaking natural phenomena, maybe they were mistaking civilian or military craft, maybe they were making up the story for attention, or maybe there were aliens operating the UFOs. I had no ability to know which was the case, and in the absence of sufficient evidence, I never felt the need to pick a pony in that race. So when he called me in, it made emotional sense to me. He was vague on the phone, just asked me to come over, told me he was looking through the rover dump and wanted a second opinion. His tone betrayed some of his excitement.

I got to his house on that Sunday around 7 pm. He related to me roughly the story above. I spent the next four hours having him walk me through each step, from the dump parsing through the EEPROM app signature generation and matching, to the discovery of the variant telecom code, to the isolation of the suspect functions, to the evidence of those functions being called, and on to what those functions appeared to do when called. I could find no break in the chain of his reasoning, every link was sound.

(continued)

(continued)

We were both pretty excited at this point, a mixture of the esoteric delight in knowing that we knew something few others did about a vehicle on another plane and the nervous knowledge that we likely weren't meant to know this, and knowledge has had a cost all the way back to the Apple; we heard the whisper of the snake, and pressed on.

He wanted to gather as much information as we could before he headed back in the next day. He was as yet undecided on whether he'd bring this up at the first SOWG meeting the next day, or whether this was better left unremarked. He wanted to make as much progress as possible that night, in the hopes that his decision the next day would be clear.

We were sure the mystery device was a radio, the code required it to be. But the fundamental question on the table was, why was this mystery radio there, and what kind of radio was it? We couldn't interrogate it directly and we'd exhausted what the code we had available could tell us, we were left with trying to logically argue what outputs made sense given its inputs. We considered many possibilities and hit upon two that seemed within the realm of possibility.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) arrived on the Mars scene in the spring of 2006, two and some years after Spirit touched down. The MRO had a new UHF radio package called Electra, more capable than what Mars Odyssey offered. Perhaps the rovers had been given a VME card which would allow them to take advantage of the increased bandwidth Electra would offer? This seemed like such a promising possibility, it could explain why the code had hooks where it did and why the system wasn't well known. Such a device in the rovers would likely never be used, as the rovers weren't expected to live long enough to see the MRO. Even if the rovers were still around, changes to Electra between MER launches and MRO orbital insertion might mean this device was outdated and unusable. Electra was engineered to benefit Mars missions; legacy support might be highly desirable but not likely mission critical. But the more we looked at this, the most likely candidate, the less sense it made. Electra had in fact been used with MER, but so far as we knew only with the standard telecom package, and only for tests. If Electra was now being used via some new device why hadn't we been alerted? Why was the code we looked at hard coded to send lower resolution thumbnails of the rover images? Downlink via relay requires the DSN and time on it isn't lightly given. Any test sending redundant data like experimental data and image thumbnails would be short-lived and this code was hardcoded; it would have been active from the time of the last mobility flight software to the time of the next one. Updates are rare, and everyone knows when they occur; they cost up to two sols to implement, and generate considerable anxiety. No such updates were recent enough to have this be merely a test. Spirit would need to be broadcasting twice, once via the normal channel, and once via this alternate channel. No regular downlinks via the normal channels were being missed, deviation from that norm would have been noticed and talked about. With ongoing concerns about power levels and overheating, unnecessary and prolonged power drain which would result from the duplicate broadcasts would be noticed. We couldn't entirely dismiss this possibility, since it was fit at least a few of the facts and all of our own prejudices. But we began to look for further evidence to support or refute it. And we considered the other likely explanation.

(I will post more tomorrow.)

edit to remove non-relevant info.

Peace

[edit on 29-3-2010 by letthereaderunderstand]

Is this going to drag on for three years or are you just going to GET TO THE POINT?

Seriously, we don't all care for science fiction, aren't all enamoured with your writing, and are INTRIGUED BY THE STORY ITSELF, how about you quit dragging us along and cut to the chase?

Originally posted by jrmcleod

The fact still remains that whether he is correct, incorrect or whatever, it is still an insightful short story that can make people smile with anticipation, which, no disrespect is far more than i can say for your negative attitude towards a captivating short story and thought patterns of 'knowing he is wrong'.

There is a forum on this site for short stories.

Do you believe this could belong there?

will hold on this post till later.

[edit on 29-3-2010 by A NeWorlDisorder]

reply to post by AstroEngineer


S+F
can't wait tomorow.

Is there any official NASA comment about this ?

Originally posted by mixmix
reply to post by AstroEngineer

 

S+F
can't wait tomorow.

Is there any official NASA comment about this ?

minutes after his first post they released a short press release detailing astroengineers involvement and right around the time they seemed to be able to deny it, they said they had to go back to work and will write more tommorow.

I can understand that the threadstarter wants to give us all the details.

But this is a long and ardous journey to follow.

Lots and lots of meaningless info about technical stuff.

I'll come back and read this in a week or two. Let's se if it boils down to something relevant.

I'm not even following the (story), I just want to see if this guy comes through. I'm going to take a wild guess and say he won't.

It's a good thing I scrolled down to see if we had another "Unleashed" playing around with some of the more gullable people on here.

I'm reminding you that you have been called out to provide us with some form of proof (possibly an identification card with your personal stuff blacked out) so you can prove who you say you are. But you probably won't do that..

reply to post by rapunzel222


It seems that some of the people posting here are more determined to drive off and discourage AstroEngineer from posting than they are in hearing what he has to say.

These types tend to feign interest by asking a question or two (to cover themselves) and then proceed to be as discouraging and insulting as they can.

*When you point out there rudeness they will point you to their questions and use them as evidence of their 'genuine interest'.



AstroEngineer,


Keep 'em coming.




[edit on 29-3-2010 by Exuberant1]

its taken him nearly 11 days to come up with this......"the rover on mars is listening to bbc radio 1 on mars"....hahahahaha...i have never heard so much tripe in all my life......do you guys really beleive this man....come on...he is making this multipart story up.......

Originally posted by BetweenTheLine
minutes after his first post they released a short press release detailing astroengineers involvement and right around the time they seemed to be able to deny it, they said they had to go back to work and will write more tommorow.

Sorry but that was hilarious.
Off-topic post over.

- Lee

Though we've had countless scenarios where the OP posted an enticing and plausible story but only not to be seen again after the timeframe the OP said he/she would post it.

However I'm willing to wait with an open mind until that time frame has passed, and hopefully the OP would of posted his credentials to add credibility.