"The Spirit rover dedicates 32MB of its 128MB of RAM to the on-board Wind River VxWorks operating system and a host of science applications, and as the mission progresses, technicians are scheduled to periodically delete old files and directories to clear out the memory for reuse.... But with all the excitement after the Mars landing on Jan. 3, and with data being returned to Earth by the rover, that step was not performed quickly enough by mission technicians," reports Computerworld.
"We just ran out of memory, ran out of RAM," [Wind River's Mike Deliman] said. "This is why we initially lost contact" with the rover.
