[meteorite-list] Mars Odyssey Returning to Service After Taking Precaution

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:52:43 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <200709181952.MAA08432_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=1473

Odyssey Returning to Service After Taking Precaution
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
September 18, 2007

The team operating NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter is returning the healthy
spacecraft to usual activities this week after a precautionary status of
reduced activity that the orbiter entered on Sept. 14.

Odyssey properly put itself into the standby "safe mode" in response to
a root cause that engineers have diagnosed as the same cause as for two
previous safe mode entries, in 2005 and 2006. When the onboard flight
computer could not get a routine response from the system that monitors
the spacecraft's orientation, a fault protection feature in the software
told the flight computer to reboot and put the spacecraft into the
standby status. In reality, the attitude-control task was operating just
fine, but a messaging interface system got stuck, leaving the flight
computer to assume the task was no longer running.

While in safe mode, Odyssey stayed in communication, with its main
antenna pointed toward Earth and its solar panels facing the sun.

The ground team is returning the spacecraft to full service step by
step. The spacecraft is expected to point its instruments and UHF relay
antenna toward Mars today (Tuesday), to resume relaying communications
from the Mars rovers on Wednesday, and to resume using its own science
instruments on Thursday. The rovers are communicating directly with
Earth while Odyssey is unavailable for relay.

"The spacecraft reacted exactly as it was designed to for this
condition," said Odyssey Mission Manager Robert Mase of NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The onboard autonomy ensures
that the spacecraft keeps itself in a safe state and allows time for the
ground teams to respond with the established contingency procedures that
were designed for these circumstances."

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the
Mars Odyssey project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate. The
orbiter reached Mars in 2001 and is partway through its second mission
extension.

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Media contact: Guy Webster, 818-354-6278
Received on Tue 18 Sep 2007 03:52:43 PM PDT