IN: Gary Wright was born and raised in Cresskill, New Jersey. A child actor, he made his TV debut at the age of seven, on the show Captain Video and His Video Rangers, filmed in New York. Among other acting work, he appeared in TV and radio commercials, before being offered a part in the 1954 Broadway production of the musical Fanny. Wright played the role of Cesario, the son of Fanny, who was played by future Brady Bunch matriarch Florence Henderson.

Wright has described his initial musical influences as "early R&B" - namely, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Bobby Bland - along with rock 'n' roll artists Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Beatles. While in Europe in 1967, Wright abandoned his plans to become a doctor and instead toured locally with a band he had formed, the New York Times. When the latter supported the English group Traffic - at Oslo in Norway, according to Wright - he met Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. Wright recalls that he and Blackwell had a mutual friend in Jimmy Miller, the New York-born producer of Island acts such as the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic. Blackwell invited Wright to London, where he joined English singer and pianist Mike Harrison and drummer Mike Kellie in their band Art (formerly the VIPs). The group soon changed its name to Spooky Tooth, with Wright as joint lead vocalist and Hammond organ player. While noting the band's lack of significant commercial success over its career, The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll describes Spooky Tooth as "a bastion of Britain's hard-rock scene". Spooky Tooth's first album was It's All About, released on Island in June 1968. Produced by Miller, it contained the Wright-composed "Sunshine Help Me" and six songs he co-wrote with either Miller, Harrison or Luther Grosvenor, the band's guitarist. Spooky Two, often considered the band's best work, followed in March 1969, with Miller again producing. Wright composed or co-composed seven of the album's eight songs, including "That Was Only Yesterday" and "Better By You, Better Than Me". Spooky Two sold well in America but, like It's All About, it failed to place on the UK's top 40 albums chart. The third Spooky Tooth album was Ceremony, a Wright-instigated collaboration with French electronic music pioneer Pierre Henry, released in December 1969. Songwriting for all the tracks was credited to Henry and Wright, after the latter had passed the band's recordings on to Henry for what The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia terms "processed musique concrete overdubs". Although Wright had traditionally provided an experimental influence within Spooky Tooth, he regretted the change of musical direction, saying in a 1973 interview: "We should have really taken off after Spooky Two but we got into the absurd situation of letting Pierre Henry make the Ceremony album. Then he took it back to France and remixed it." With bass player Greg Ridley having already left the band in 1969 to join Humble Pie, Wright departed in January 1970 to pursue a solo career.

Did the band break up?

OUT:

IN: Spirit, also known as MER-A (Mars Exploration Rover - A) or MER-2, is a robotic rover on Mars, active from 2004 to 2010. It was one of two rovers of NASA's ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It landed successfully on Mars at 04:35 Ground UTC on January 4, 2004, three weeks before its twin, Opportunity (MER-B), landed on the other side of the planet. Its name was chosen through a NASA-sponsored student essay competition.

On January 21, 2004 (sol 17), Spirit abruptly ceased communicating with mission control. The next day the rover radioed a 7.8 bit/s beep, confirming that it had received a transmission from Earth but indicating that the craft believed it was in a fault mode. Commands would only be responded to intermittently. This was described as a very serious anomaly, but potentially recoverable if it were a software or memory corruption issue rather than a serious hardware failure. Spirit was commanded to transmit engineering data, and on January 23 sent several short low-bitrate messages before finally transmitting 73 megabits via X band to Mars Odyssey. The readings from the engineering data suggested that the rover was not staying in sleep mode. As such, it was wasting its battery energy and overheating - risk factors that could potentially destroy the rover if not fixed soon. On sol 20, the command team sent it the command SHUTDWN_DMT_TIL ("Shutdown Dammit Until") to try to cause it to suspend itself until a given time. It seemingly ignored the command. The leading theory at the time was that the rover was stuck in a "reboot loop". The rover was programmed to reboot if there was a fault aboard. However, if there was a fault that occurred during reboot, it would continue to reboot forever. The fact that the problem persisted through reboot suggested that the error was not in RAM, but in either the flash memory, the EEPROM, or a hardware fault. The last case would likely doom the rover. Anticipating the potential for errors in the flash memory and EEPROM, the designers had made it so that the rover could be booted without ever touching the flash memory. The radio itself could decode a limited command set - enough to tell the rover to reboot without using flash. Without access to flash memory the reboot cycle was broken. On sol 19 (January 24, 2004) the rover repair team announced that the problem was with Spirit's flash memory and the software that wrote to it. The flash hardware was believed to be working correctly but the file management module in the software was "not robust enough" for the operations the Spirit was engaged in when the problem occurred, indicating that the problem was caused by a software bug as opposed to faulty hardware. NASA engineers finally came to the conclusion that there were too many files on the file system, which was a relatively minor problem. Most of these files contained unneeded in-flight data. After realizing what the problem was, the engineers deleted some files, and eventually reformatted the entire flash memory system. On February 6 (sol 33), the rover was restored to its original working condition, and science activities resumed.

What happened on January 21, 2004?

OUT:
Spirit abruptly ceased communicating with mission control.