<p>A computer glitch on Nasa’s Mars rover Curiosity has forced the scientists to put the robot on safe mode while engineers try to fix the problem.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The intentional swap put the rover, as anticipated, into a minimal-activity precautionary status called “safe mode,” Nasa said.<br /><br />The team will shift the rover from safe mode to operational status in a few days and is troubleshooting the condition that affected operations. The condition is related to a glitch in flash memory linked to the other, now-inactive, computer.<br /><br />“We switched computers to get to a standard state from which to begin restoring routine operations,” said Richard Cook of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, project manager for the Mars Science Laboratory Project.Like many spacecraft, Curiosity carries a pair of redundant main computers in order to have a backup available if one fails. Each of the computers, A-side and B-side, also has other redundant subsystems linked to just that computer. Curiosity is now operating on its B-side, as it did during part of the flight from earth to Mars.<br /><br />“While we are resuming operations on the B-side, we are also working to determine the best way to restore the A-side as a viable backup,” said JPL engineer Magdy Bareh, leader of the mission’s anomaly resolution team.<br /><br />The spacecraft remained in communications at all scheduled communication windows, but it did not send recorded data, only current status information.<br />The status information revealed that the computer had not switched to the usual daily “sleep” mode when planned.<br /><br />Diagnostic work in a testing simulation at JPL indicates the situation involved corrupted memory at an A-side memory location used for addressing memory files.</p>
<p>A computer glitch on Nasa’s Mars rover Curiosity has forced the scientists to put the robot on safe mode while engineers try to fix the problem.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The intentional swap put the rover, as anticipated, into a minimal-activity precautionary status called “safe mode,” Nasa said.<br /><br />The team will shift the rover from safe mode to operational status in a few days and is troubleshooting the condition that affected operations. The condition is related to a glitch in flash memory linked to the other, now-inactive, computer.<br /><br />“We switched computers to get to a standard state from which to begin restoring routine operations,” said Richard Cook of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, project manager for the Mars Science Laboratory Project.Like many spacecraft, Curiosity carries a pair of redundant main computers in order to have a backup available if one fails. Each of the computers, A-side and B-side, also has other redundant subsystems linked to just that computer. Curiosity is now operating on its B-side, as it did during part of the flight from earth to Mars.<br /><br />“While we are resuming operations on the B-side, we are also working to determine the best way to restore the A-side as a viable backup,” said JPL engineer Magdy Bareh, leader of the mission’s anomaly resolution team.<br /><br />The spacecraft remained in communications at all scheduled communication windows, but it did not send recorded data, only current status information.<br />The status information revealed that the computer had not switched to the usual daily “sleep” mode when planned.<br /><br />Diagnostic work in a testing simulation at JPL indicates the situation involved corrupted memory at an A-side memory location used for addressing memory files.</p>