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This image was taken by Navcam: Left, aboard Curiosity, the NASA rover robot, October 13, 2018.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Curiosity, NASA's robot rover, is putting its "new" brain in a state of functioning while mission team members are trying to solve a memory problem with the "old" one.
"I manage with a little help from my friends.Through the team that replaced me with the computer A, I took and sent back images this week with a camera that I have not used since 2013. Work continues to be full operations are back online. https://go.nasa.gov/2OwGtcH "said yesterday (17 October) the mission team via the official Twitter account of Curiosity, @MarsCuriosity.
Incidentally, this camera is Curiosity's "Left A" navigation camera. [Photos: Spectacular Mars Vistas by NASA’s Curiosity Rover]
Like many NASA spacecraft, Curiosity has been launched with two redundant computers, which the team calls A-side and B-side. Face A was in action when the car-sized robot landed inside Red Planet's Gale Crater in August 2012, but it had a serious problem about 200 days later, which resulted in a change of hands on side B.
Curiosity worked well with Side B until the middle of last month, when the mission team noticed that the rover was struggling to store the scientific data it had collected, as well as some technical information.
Thus, about two weeks later, Curiosity returned to Group A, which had been patched up over the past years. But there will be another brain exchange in the near future if everything goes as planned.
I manage with a little help from my friends. Thanks to the team that brought me back to computer A, I took and sent back images this week with a camera that I have not used since 2013. Work continues so that all the operations are done . https://t.co/01SafGIwDs pic.twitter.com/xEVdwFrEYL
– Rover Curiosity (@MarsCuriosity) October 17, 2018
"It is certainly possible to conduct the mission on the Side-A computer if we really need it," said Steven Lee, deputy project manager at Curiosity, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. in a statement. "But our plan is to go back to face B as soon as we can solve the problem in order to use its larger memory size."
For more than six years on Mars, Curiosity has been assessing the planet's past ability to host microbial life and gather data that could help scientists better understand the dramatic climate change it experienced long ago: relatively hot and humid, cold and dry.
The six-wheeled rover has uncovered evidence of a system of potentially living and long-lived lakes and streams on the soil of the crater of Gale. Since September 2014, Curiosity explores the foothills of Mount Sharp, a strange mountain extending from the crater center to 3.5 km.
Mike Wall's book on the quest for extraterrestrial life, "Out There," will be published on November 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally posted on Space.com.
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