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Friday December 11, 2009
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NASA has revived the $720 million Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from its months-long slumber following a computer glitch, Space.com reports.
The MRO has unexpectedly rebooted several times over the past year. Back in August, the MRO fell into safe mode once again. But rather than rebooting it right away, NASA engineers spent the past several months figuring out what the root cause of the problem was. In the meantime, the craft's safe mode preserved it from additional damage.
"The patient is out of danger, but more steps have to be taken to get it back on its feet," said Jim Erickson, the spacecraft's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., in the article.
NASA repaired the orbiter by uploading a software upgrade that patched a "potentially mission-killing scenario" in the spacecraft's computer: back-to-back reboots.
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December 11, 2009 6:54 PM
Awesome! A great example of engineering minds at work: instead of just beating your head against a problem until it works, take it away and start thinking about it until you come up with a real solution - and one that's going to provide additional information for science experiments going forward.