NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover hit a snag late last week, when a memory glitch forced it into a "safe mode" while NASA prepared a backup and diagnosed the trouble, but now Rover successfully come out of safe mode, according to a report.
NASA engineer confirmed Mars Curiosity Rover will resume limited science operations this week.
"I don't expect there to be any long-term impact," said the Mars Science Laboratory project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Richard Cook, according to Reuters. But "it's probably too early to tell."
"We spent the weekend kind of getting back, not totally to regular operations, but at least out of the immediate safe mode kind of a thing," he said. "We got it out of safe mode, got back to using the high-gain antenna, so we're well along the way to restoring things."
The problem began last Wednesday when Curiosity failed to send feedback data as expected and then didn't put shut itself down during its scheduled off time. On other space missions, Cook said, similar problems were caused by high-energy solar and cosmic ray strikes. He said that's probably what happened this time.
"One path of progress is evaluating the A-side with intent to recover it as a backup. Also, we need to go through a series of steps with the B-side, such as informing the computer about the state of the rover -- the position of the arm, the position of the mast, that kind of information," Cook said in a statement.
At this point, NASA engineers are looking to keep Curiosity running on the B-side system, while repairing the A-side so it can be on stand-by as the new backup.
The computer problem is the first noteworthy glitch since Curiosity's landing on August.6 last year in Gale Crater. The $2.5 billion mission is to search for signs of past or present life and for evidence of organic compounds like those necessary for life as it is known on Earth. Mars Curiosity Rover's mission is slated to last for at least two years and possibly longer, depending on funding and the condition of the spacecraft.