Curiosity Rover Back in the Game Following Software Glitch

After spending three days in safe mode, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is back in the game, the agency announced Tuesday.

The probe went into safe mode Nov. 7 when an unanticipated software reboot, called a warm reset, occurred during a communications pass with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Three days later, the agency received confirmation from Mars that Curiosity had transitioned back into a fully operational state.

"We returned to normal engineering operations," Rajeev Joshi, a software and systems engineer for the Curiosity mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement "We are well into planning the next several days of surface operations and expect to resume our drive to Mount Sharp this week."

The problem was an error in existing onboard software, which caused a glitch in a catalog file, the operations team discovered after a careful analysis of data returned by the spacecraft. This error then triggered an unplanned reset when the catalog was processed by a version of flight software installed Thursday. The team quickly replicated the problem successfully on ground testbeds and uplinked commands recovering the spacecraft early Sunday.

Scientists from the Mars Science Laboratory Project are employing Curiosity in the effort to determine whether areas inside Gale Crater were once hospitable for microbes. Mount Sharp forms the central peak within Gale Crater, and has long been the ultimate destination of the the rover due to its alluring stratification, each representing a different page in the history of Mars.

Curiosity landed on Mars following a dramatic parachute-landing August 2012. Since then, it's made several key discoveries, including signs of an ancient stream flow and evidence in the form of a rock analysis that life could once have been presence on the Red Planet. However, the probe's inability to detect methane in the planet's atmosphere, announced back in September, was considered a major blow to the prospects of finding life that currently call Mars home.