The NASA Curiosity Rover in Mars went into "safe mode" for three days as its protective response from a software update from Earth. It resumed its mission Tuesday after the engineers successfully fixed the software glitch.
The car-sized robotic rover exploring the Red Planet automatically went into safe mode on Saturday while the administrators from Earth attempt to solve a glitch on its built-in software which caused its catalog file to fail. They sent new software on Thursday but it didn't respond to the update by rebooting into safe mode.
"The team was able to replicate the problem on ground testbeds the following day," NASA officials wrote in a mission update Tuesday. "Commands recovering the spacecraft were uplinked to the spacecraft early Sunday morning."
Curiosity began its exploration in the steep Mt. Sharp of Mars in July. It has already travelled a third of the 8.6 kilometer (5.3 miles) distance required for it to reach its goal. Previous to this, it also explored Mar's Gale Crater as part of its mission to investigate the Martian climate and geology, assess the environmental conditions if it is capable of sustaining microbial life, and check for presence of water. So far it has given enough evidence of ancient life billions of years ago in the Yellowknife Bay.
With the Curiosity rover back on track in its mission, the scientists are anticipating more gathered data as the rover progresses toward Mt. Sharp. They are expecting the Mars rover to take the trek up the mountain to probe into the red planet's environment and the changes it went through over the years.
According to missions software and systems engineer Rajeev Joshi of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "We returned to normal engineering operations. We are well into planning the next several days of surface operations and expect to resume our drive to Mount Sharp this week.
