I was plodding away on the treadmill watching the news conference when Pete Theisinger described the problem such as they know it. The embedded software guy in me yelled 'address line' and sure enough he mentioned that possibility a few minutes later. There's a lot of analysis left, but this is quite interesting. The magnitude of the problem would depend very much on which address line it might be. If it's a fairly high-order line, then it might be possible to work around it with a reasonable amount of functionality. I remember one of the large planetary probes (perhaps one of the Voyagers) had some bad memory that they programmed around. That was pretty slick. I've debugged an awful lot of flaky hardware and software, but it's always been sitting right in front of me. I've never had to analyze a piece of gear 100 million miles away. I've always had an awful lot of respect for those engineers at JPL. Good luck to them this time around. Michael
Mood at the news conference that's going on now is decidedly more upbeat with the lander's "medical" condition being raised from critical to serious.