Though Larrys' post on command protocals seems to render this unlikey, I was suspecting there may have been corrupted packets sent to the rover, if the sofware was not designed right it could make the rover go wiggy. Like the rover is in safe mode but some unexpected variable is bouncing around inside some function somewhere blocking attempts to get it to do something else. . .

However I would expect them to design the sofware for the rover to be quite robust and error check with the utmost scrutiny. So while this would be the easiest to fix and thus most desireable problem, we should be able to pretty much rule it out.

This leads me to wonder, what do they program these things in? For some reason I suspect a real low level language like assembler or ada (still used for cruse missiles).