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Matthew writes: Spirit operations project manager Pete Theisinger admitted on Saturday morning that the Spirit rover’s embedded operating system was actually Windows 98, acquired through NASA’s COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) procurement process as part of the better-faster-cheaper oxymoron under which NASA’s projects since the Space Shuttle have been designed.

“We did a lot of testing. A lot. We really thought we had covered pretty everything. We had Norton System Recovery, MIME Sweeper, ZoneAlarm Pro, and CrashRecover 2 installed. But last Monday when the computer on Spirit started crashing, one of the engineers remembered that we left the OEM copy of McAffee ViruScan running in the system tray, which may have been triggered by an unknown Martian virus, or a Gator popup. McAffee ViruScan is notoriously unreliable on Windows 98, and is also a suspect in the loss of the British Beagle 2.

Theisinger also admitted that the computing hardware consisted of a used Compaq Presario notebook computer that he personally had donated to the effort. “Perhaps we should have re-installed the operating system from scratch, but nobody could find a Windows 98 CD-ROM, and the laptop can’t boot from CD anyway.”

NASA now has the rover running in “Safe Mode” to bypass software problems. Enabling safemode was a dicey hacking operation, considering that NASA’s control protocol is a VNC server that is not available until the computer is completely booted.

“Opportunity is running Windows NT 4 Workstation, so we shouldn’t have any problems with it.”