Mars Rover Curiosity in 'Safe Mode' After Glitch

[NeoGreen]

http://www.space.com/33359-mars-rover-curiosity-safe-mode.html

Mars Rover Curiosity in 'Safe Mode' After Glitch
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
July 6, 2016 02:37pm ET

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity went into a precautionary "safe mode" over the Fourth of July weekend, but the robot is currently stable and communicating with its handlers back on Earth, space agency officials said.

Curiosity put itself into the minimal-activity safe mode on Saturday (July 2), for reasons that engineers are still trying to tease out.

"Preliminary information indicates an unexpected mismatch between camera software and data-processing software in the main computer," NASA officials wrote in a status update today (July 6). "The near-term steps toward resuming full activities begin with requesting more diagnostic information from Curiosity."

The car-size Curiosity has entered safe mode three times before — all in 2013 — and bounced back fully every time.

Curiosity landed inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater in August 2012, kicking off a $2.5 billion mission to determine if the area could ever have supported microbial life. The six-wheeled robot's observations have revealed that Gale Crater hosted a long-lasting, potentially habitable lake-and-stream system in the ancient past.

[tonyt53]

1. I always thought that thing looked like Wall-e.

[PJMcK]

2. A tip of the hat to the scientists, engineers and technicians...

...who designed, built and operate Curiosity and Opportunity. These are remarkable machines providing us with tremendous knowledge about our solar system. The same can be said for New Horizons and Juno. These people are national treasures.

What a great idea it was to design the machine to protect itself if something goes wrong! Then to be able to communicate with controllers on earth to resolve the problem.

These people are geniuses.

[Warren DeMontague]

3. Microsoft is trying to force it to upgrade to Windows 10.

[trotsky]

4. Good one.

LOL