| JET
PROPULSION LABORATORY
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. |
