Mission Controllers Revive Spirit's Memory

"Spirit made incredible progress over the weekend," said mission manager Jennifer Trosper. "Today we are doing science on Spirit. She is back to the state she was in on Day One." [LA Times -- signup required]

Yay! That's great. Apparently they fixed it by deleting more than 1,700 files. It still seems to me that it is quite strange that with the money they spent on this system that they ended up with an OS and file system that would crash and reboot as the number of files increased. I mean, given how much was riding on the software working, how could they never have tested having a realistic number of files? But at least they're able to deal with it. And being able to do so from Earth when we're talking about a computer on Mars is still an amazing accomplishment.