NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity gets back to work at its old location

In addition to more than two weeks of scientific operations, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has made its longest run since an anomaly in memory two months ago, bringing its total odometry to more than 20 kilometers.

The rover is now located on Orcadie Lake on the Red Planet, a site where NASA previously tried to drill into the gray rock.

NASA had already attempted to obtain rock samples using the Curiosity drill at these sites. However, the mobile instrument did not penetrate enough into the bedrock to generate enough samples.

On Tuesday, Curiosity traveled 60 meters to this former site.

With this latest record, the Curiosity mission is back in business, NASA said in a statement, adding that the next drilling event would take place towards the end of the week.

"At this point, we are confident that we can fully resume our operations, but it is too early to say in what timeframe," said Steven Lee of JPL, Deputy Project Manager of Curiosity.

While working on the problem of memory anomalies, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineers in California had ordered the mobile to switch to its second computer, called a Side-A computer.

This switch will allow engineers to carry out a detailed diagnosis of a technical problem that prevented the active mobile computer (B side) from storing scientific data and some key technical data since September 15, announced The NASA.

"We are working on the A side as of today, but it may take some time to fully understand the root cause of the problem and find workarounds for the B side memory.

The computer exchange will allow data and event records to be stored on the A side computer.

"We spent last week checking out the A side and preparing it for the exchange," Lee said.

"It is certainly possible to run the mission on the side A computer if we really need it.But our plan is to get back to side B as soon as we can solve the problem in order to use its largest memory size. "

<! –

->