They've apparently homed in on Spirit's recent techical difficulties enough to communicate with it again. Seems that there's some kind of issue with the flash memory, so they told it to go to sleep last night (and succeeded!), and rebooted it in "cripple mode" so RAM is used instead of flash memory at startup. It isn't fixed, but at least now they can communicate with it. I think this is a great example of fail-safe engineering and I'm very impressed.