Mars rover Opportunity bounces back from computer glitch

NASA's Opportunity rover apparently got into some shenanigans while Mars was tucked away behind the Sun last month, but the mission team was able to get the spunky little rover back up and running on Wednesday.

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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When Opportunity's team checked in with its veteran Mars explorer on April 27th, they found that it had switched into 'standby' mode back on April 22nd.

"Our current suspicion is that Opportunity rebooted its flight software, possibly while the cameras on the mast were imaging the sun," MER project manager John Callas, said in a NASA JPL statement on Monday. "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."

With this being the fifth conjunction that they've weathered, the mission team was prepared for this kind of situation, and had strategies in place to deal with the problem. New commands were sent to the rover and it was brought back online and resumed normal operations as of Wednesday, May 1st.

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This is great news. Opportunity has been doing so well in its extended mission, it would have been a shame to lose it now. The rover has already fulfilled its primary mission — to search for evidence of past water on Mars — and is currently conducting followup science along the edge of an impact crater known as Endeavor.

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