Students add power to the team
June 8, 2009 by david.gump
BY Prachi Patel // June 2009
The rover has gone blind. It had been running all night, its two mast-mounted cameras capturing high-resolution stereo images of its surroundings. Now it’s sitting idly in the middle of the room. Fixing the thing is not how Ross Finman had planned to start his day at the lab.
Finman, a 19-year-old undergraduate wearing wrinkled black trousers and an old brown leather jacket, uses a laptop to log on wirelessly to the rover’s computer. ”That’s weird,” he says, and tries to restart the cameras. Still no go. Definitely not a good day.
”Who touched it?” he says.
”I did,” a student nearby shouts back. ”That’s why it shouldn’t be broken.”
Finman summons Michael Furlong, a grad student and the camera wizard around here. Furlong pulls up a diagnostics screen on the laptop. Some log files had grown excessively large, eating up CPU cycles. He deletes the files and reboots the computer. Seconds later, the rover can see again.
