NASA has confirmed that the Mars Rover Curiosity has resumed its normal operations on Saturday, November 23, 2013, after a few days its work had been suspended following the detection of an electrical abnormality. The rover was never in real dangers but as a precaution it was decided to interrupt the scientific research it’s pursuing in order to proceed to a diagnosis of the problem without any worries.

On November 17, the control center of the Mars Science Laboratory mission announced that there was a change in the voltage between the rover’s chassis and the 32-volt power supply to that distributes electricity to its systems. There was a suspicion that this was what in the jargon is called “soft short” , ie a short circuit that occurs when current passes through some material that is only a partial conductor of electricity .

For the Mars Rover Curiosity there had been a soft short during the day of its landing on Mars. In that case, the problem was due to the equipment that managed the deployment of the rover’s instruments during the arrival on the red planet.

The del Mars Rover Curiosity’s electrical systems are designed to be able to tolerate without problems voltage changes precisely to avoid possible damages. Phenomena such as the soft short, however, can reduce tolerance toward other future soft shorts and may indicate a possible problem in a component of Curiosity. For this reason, it was decided to suspend its activities and proceed with a diagnosis of the problem.

After careful analysis of the possible causes of the problem, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have identified as the main suspect the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG). This is the generator that converts heat derived from the natural decay of the plutonium contained in the Mars Rover Curiosity into electricity.

It may happen that an internal short circuit to a generator of that type can cause a change in the supplied voltage but it’s not a dangerous problem. In this case, after Curiosity has resumed its work the voltage was normal, to the levels prior to November 17.

Given the obvious impossibility to repair hardware problems to a space probe, those vehicles are designed to withstand electrical stresses that would destroy normal equipment. At mission control center, however, they’re cautious in the presence of anomalies and only now the operations of Curiosity got back to normal.

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