PASADENA, Calif., Feb. 2 (UPI) -- NASA announced Monday its Mars Spirit rover is running again for the first time since it stopped working properly more than a week ago.
Mission engineers said they completed repair work on Spirit's troubled flash memory system, which retains data on an emergency basis if power is lost. A glitch caused the rover's computer to reboot itself about once an hour.
Mission scientist Mark Adler said the Spirit team was able to repair the rover's ailing memory software by deleting thousands of files, many of which were left over from its seven-month flight to Mars and were no longer needed.
"To be safe, we want to reformat the flash (memory) and start again with a clean slate," he said. The reformatting will delete all flash-memory-related files and reinstall the software.
Spirit rejoins its twin, Opportunity, in a mission to analyze Martian rocks to look for signs that water once flowed across the red planet's surface.
