Why NASA must reverse the "brain" of Curiosity

The last few months have been pretty tough for NASA's Martian rovers. The opportunity still has not responded to NASA's frequent missives, and this week mission specialists decided that in order to rejuvenate Curiosity's languishing memory, they had to change their "brain".

First of all, a bit of context. NASA currently has two active rovers on Mars – Opportunity, which landed in 2004, and Curiosity, which landed in 2012. In June of this year, a dust storm forced the solar operator to close its doors . Although the dust has dissipated and NASA is still listening, Opportunity remains silent.

On the bright side, for almost all of these three months, the car-sized Curiosity rover was doing very well, relying on batteries from nuclear batteries that had not been hit by the darkened sky by the dust. Then, during a weekend in September, mission engineers on Earth noticed that the rover was not sending the scientific data it collected to the surface. Something was really not going well.

They quickly stopped their scientific activities and tried to understand what was wrong, but with so little data returned from the surface, it was difficult to make an accurate diagnosis. So now, they perform a virtual operation, ordering the mobile to switch from the computer he uses (side B) to the redundant computer he embarks on board (side A). In anthropomorphic terms, they tell him to change brain.

If this sounds familiar to you, you may remember an incident with Curiosity that occurred five years ago. At the time when Curiosity landed in 2011, it was using the computer's side A. But in 2013, this computer had a major memory problem that constantly interfered with mobile operations. NASA tipped the robot to side B, relegating side A to the rescue position. They ensured that the memory problem of side A was isolated and resolved in case a similar event occurred.

Scientists are turning the computers back on, but it is unclear when Curiosity will resume its usual routine of photographing the surface and drilling rocks.

"At this point, we are confident that we can fully resume our operations, but it is too early to say when," said Steven Lee, Deputy Project Manager of Curiosity. "We are working on the A side as of today, but it may take us some time to fully understand the root cause of the problem and find workarounds for the B side memory."

"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. "

Although Opportunity and Curiosity are in a desperate situation, there is still hope that they will eventually recover. And other rovers arrive on the red planet. NASA's Mars 2020 rover and the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover are to be launched in 2020.