Mars Odyssey Mission Status 27 Apr 2001

Flight controllers for NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey
spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory report that the
spacecraft is doing fine after the reset of one of its on-
board computers Tuesday, possibly caused by a solar flare.

“The spacecraft is in excellent condition and back in its
normal operating mode,” said David A. Spencer, Odyssey’s
mission manager at JPL. “We are looking into the possibility
that intensified solar activity may have affected data in the
on-board memory.” The affected data in the computer memory is
believed to be the cause of the computer reset that happened
Tuesday morning. Preliminary data analysis indicates that a
reset of the on-board flight computer caused the entry into
“safe mode.” The spacecraft returned to normal operations
Wednesday morning.

Prior to the safing event on Tuesday, the spacecraft
transitioned to its cruise attitude where it points its high-
gain antenna toward the Earth. On Monday, the team turned on
the Martian radiation environment experiment and Wednesday
they turned on the electronics for the gamma ray spectrometer
instrument.

Today, 20 days after launch, Odyssey is about 5.8 million
kilometers (3.6 million miles) from Earth and traveling at a
speed of about 39 kilometers per second (about 69,300 miles
per hour) relative to the Sun.

The Mars Odyssey mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington,
D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, Calif. The Odyssey spacecraft was built
by Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, Colo.