NASA Mars Exploration Rover Status 3 October 2005

OPPORTUNITY UPDATE: Slight Hiccup Before Getting to ‘Erebus Crater’ – sol 592-598, Oct 03, 2005:

Opportunity suffered a warm reboot last week. After the flight computer rebooted, the spacecraft went into ‘safe mode’. This error caused the team to miss two Odyssey passes. The evening pass was missed because the reboot occurred during the Odyssey pass. The morning pass was missed because safe mode enforces the deep sleep behavior.

Real-time commands were sent on sol 597 in order to access the state of the vehicle. Opportunity was healthy and the team regained control of the vehicle. A “lite” master sequence was loaded and sol 597 became a stand down day. On sol 598, the initial system recovery steps were taken and subsystems were tested. All subsystems look good.

This week Opportunity will continue with nominal operations. The rover will continue to move west around Erebus Crater.

Sol-by-sol summaries:

Sol 592: Drove 1.75 meter (convert) and approached target ‘Deception’ on the feature ‘South Shetland’

Sol 593: Unstowed the robotic arm, used rock abrasion tool brush, took a stereo microscopic image and then placed the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer.

Sol 594: Continued the robotic arm campaign. Placed the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, then changed tool to the Moessbauer spectrometer.

Sol 595: Continued the robotic arm campaign. Placed alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on new target then change tool to the Moessbauer spectrometer on the next sol.

Sol 596: Anomaly – warm reboot day

Sol 597: Stand Down Day

Sol 598: Recovery day, subsystem testing