NASA announced that the Mars Rover Curiosity is returning to its normal operating state after the problems discovered last week following some errors found in the flash memory of the computer that was active at that time.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013, the Mars Rover Curiosity didn’t send the data collected, as it normally did, only information about its current status. This information showed that the computer didn’t enter its scheduled sleep mode. The engineers at JPL made a diagnostic work on a simulation which indicated the presence of corruption in the flash memory of the active computer.

The Mars Rover Curiosity is equipped with two identical computers in order to allow its operations even in case of failure. On this occasion, the mission control team took steps to switch control of Curiosity to the second computer. To do so, on February 28 the rover was placed in safe mode, a state of precautionary minimal activities.

Of course, the Mars Rover Curiosity research have been suspended and an investigation started to try to understand the causes of the problem. On Saturday, the rover came out of safe mode and started resuming its active state. The system is complex, therefore you can’t just reboot it using the second computer to put Curiosity back to full activity.

It takes a few days to fully configure the second computer so that it’s ready to resume its mission from the point where the Mars Rover Curiosity had stopped. It’s in fact necessary to carry out a series of steps such as to inform the computer of the state of the rover, the position of the robotic arm and so on.

Another thing to do is to evaluate the computer used from the beginning of the mission until last week to see if it can be recovered. In case of positive outcome, it will be used as a backup computer and will be reactivated in the event that the second computer should also have problems.

This isn’t the first time that during a space mission such problems occur and in other occasions the corrupted memory was subsequently recovered. If the damage is found to be permanent, the flash memory can be likely used in any way in order to be able to use that computer as a backup.

The cause of the data corruption in the computer memory isn’t yet clear but the most likely cause is cosmic rays. Those subatomic particles travel through space at high speeds and their high energy can cause damage to electronic systems even though they’re shielded.

At the moment, the biggest doubt on the return of the Mars Rover Curiosity to full activity is caused by a solar flare that took place this Tuesday. It was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection so plasma was blasted out of the Sun and is traveling also towards the planets of the solar system. Considering the energy of the plasma, it’s safer to put Curiosity in a sleep mode and have it return to full activity after the end of this Sun flare.

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