[meteorite-list] Curiosity Rover's Recovery Moving Forward

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:33:40 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201303112233.r2BMXexC012036_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-091

Curiosity Rover's Recovery Moving Forward
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
March 11, 2013

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity continues to move forward
with assessment and recovery from a memory glitch that affected the
rover's A-side computer. Curiosity has two computers that are redundant
of one another. The rover is currently operating using the B-side
computer, which is operating as expected.

Over the weekend, Curiosity's mission operations team continued testing
and assessing the A-side computer's memory.

"These tests have provided us with a great deal of information about the
rover's A-side memory," said Jim Erickson, deputy project manager for
the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We have been able to store new data in
many of the memory locations previously affected and believe more runs
will demonstrate more memory is available."

Two software patches, targeting onboard memory allocation and vehicle
safing procedures, are likely to be uplinked later this week. After the
software patches are installed, the mission team will reassess when to
resume full mission operations.

Controllers switched the rover to a redundant onboard computer, the
rover's "B-side" computer, on Feb. 28 when the "A-side" computer that
the rover had been using demonstrated symptoms of a corrupted memory
location. The intentional side swap put the rover, as anticipated, into
minimal-activity safe mode. Curiosity exited safe mode on Saturday,
March 2, and resumed using its high-gain antenna the following day.

The cause for the A-side's memory symptoms remains to be determined.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess
whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment
for microbes. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate
in Washington.

More information about Curiosity is online at
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://www.nasa.gov/msl and
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook
at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at:
http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle at jpl.nasa.gov

2013-091
Received on Mon 11 Mar 2013 06:33:40 PM PDT