To protect FIDO, we always made sure that there was an engineer standing just a few paces from the rover who was responsible for making sure the rover never did anything that would cause it to damage itself. This was quite often Terry Huntsberger, one of the principals on the FIDO project. […] If Terry noticed something dangerous about to happen, he would hit a red button on the back of the rover that would cause the rover to immediately stop moving. This was called “spanking” the rover, and it happened VERY rarely. Still, I must admit that it was comforting to me to know that Terry was always out there, watching every motion of the rover. If we made a mistake, we might feel pretty stupid about it, but Terry would stop us before it was too late.
It’s hard to mentally adjust to the fact that there isn’t anyone standing behind Spirit wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, ready to spank the rover if we do anything wrong.
(from a journal at NASA)
I think they should rename “Rover” to “Monkey”.
The idea of NASA spending billions to “spank” their “Monkey” would be so entertaining. :-)