Rover Team's confidence will rebound from Glitch

We still do not know exactly what is upsetting NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, but the mission team members are optimistic that they will be able to restart the six-wheeled robot.

Since Saturday evening (September 15), Curiosity has struggled to transmit to the Earth some scientific and technical data stored in his memory. Curiosity has been ruled out of all scientific operations as the mission team investigates the problem.

The problem is related to the internal file system of the mobile. Something is preventing the mobile from accessing the locations where the affected data is stored, said Steve Lee, Deputy Curiosity Project Manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. [Photos: Spectacular Mars Vistas by NASA’s Curiosity Rover]

"The team is methodically reducing the potential causes, but it has not yet determined whether it is hardware or software related," Lee told Space.com by email.

The good news is that Curiosity remains stable, healthy and responsive. For example, it always sends home engineering data in real time (which is very useful for people trying to diagnose the problem). This is not a critical situation for the time, as the computer problem that arose around 200 Martian days after landing Curiosity in August 2012 on the red planet, said Lee.

"During the Sol 200 anomaly, the rover did not respond to commands and did not sleep to recharge its battery," he said.

This previous problem, he added, is due to a combination of two problems: a partial hardware failure of Curiosity's main computer memory, known as A-side, and a software bug .

The mission team ended up trading the mobile with its identical backup computer (side B), which still works to this day. The engineers then corrected the software bug, and the team limited the use of A-side memory to the amount still available, Lee said.

So while the current problem is "quite technically complex", the team is far from being discouraged. After all, Curiosity has overcome seemingly more serious setbacks and engineers have several options to deal with the current situation.

"The team is confident that they will find a solution to allow Curiosity to return to normal scientific operations," Lee said.

"If the problem is related to the memory hardware, it may be possible [to] bypass all the parts of the memory banks that are no longer working, "he said." If it's a software bug, a solution can be developed to put it in place. " level the embedded flight software of Curiosity. And, finally, a backup computer is available, but with less available memory due to the Sol 200 anomaly. "

During its six years of existence on Mars, Curiosity has found ample evidence that the red planet could have supported microbial life in the past. For example, observations from the rover helped scientists determine that the Curiosity landing site, the Gale Crater ground 154 kilometers wide, was home to a long lake system billions of years ago. .

Since September 2014, Curiosity has been exploring the foothills of Mount Sharp, 5.5 km from the center of Gale. The robot reads the layers of rock as they go, looking for clues to Mars' transition from a relatively hot and humid world to the cold, dry planet it is today.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @ michaeldwall and Google+. follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally posted on Space.com.