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January 22, 2004 We've just hit the first significant bump in the road since Spirit landed. By now you've heard the news that we've been having communications problems with our rover. It's cause for concern, certainly, but it's not cause for alarm. I've been in this business for almost 25 years now, and I've been involved in over a dozen different planetary missions. I don't know of a single one that hasn't had a problem like this somewhere along the line, and I include in that list missions like Voyager and Magellan that were spectacular successes. This kind of thing is part of the business of operating complicated spacecraft far from Earth.
There are two reasons to be optimistic. One is that Spirit is very, very good at keeping itself safe. This vehicle knows how to protect itself when something goes wrong, and can do so for long periods of time. The other reason for optimism is that the MER engineering team is very, very good at figuring out what's going on when something goes wrong. Given enough time they're going to get it, and I expect Spirit to give them all the time they need. So I'm very optimistic that we'll get this straightened out, and get back to the business of exploring Gusev crater.
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