Mars Opportunity in standby mode after solar conjunction

When Mars emerged from behind the Sun last week, NASA discovered that their Opportunity rover — now in its 10th year of operation on the Red Planet — had gone into 'standby' mode due to a software problem.

Mars reached 'solar conjunction' around the middle of April, when it was exactly on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth. Since the Sun's influence could have corrupted any signals they sent to their rovers and satellites that are currently investigating Mars, NASA put a moratorium on issuing commands to the robots and satellites until the end of the month.

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The Mars Curiosity team is expected to start talking to its rover tomorrow (May 1st), but when Opportunity's team checked in with its veteran Mars explorer, they found that it had switched into 'standby' mode on April 22nd.

"Our current suspicion is that Opportunity rebooted its flight software, possibly while the cameras on the mast were imaging the sun," said John Callas, the project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission, according to a NASA JPL statement. "We found the rover in a standby state called automode, in which it maintains power balance and communication schedules, but waits for instructions from the ground. We crafted our solar conjunction plan to be resilient to this kind of rover reset, if it were to occur."

This isn't the Opportunity teams' first rodeo, though. This is the fifth conjunction that they've weathered, so they have strategies in place to deal with problems like these. New commands are being sent to the rover to bring it back online.

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I still find it amazing that Opportunity is still going after over nine years, considering that its original mission — to search for signs of past water activity on Mars — was only scheduled to be three months long. Here's hoping that it can easily recover from this software issue and keep on going for another nine more.

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