Curiosity Rover is Back from Dead After Facing Computer Glitch

NASA already lost the Opportunity rover on the Planet Mars, and they were on the Verge of losing the Curiosity rover. Due to the computer glitch, the Curiosity rover was assumed dead on February 15th, when the Boot-up sequence failed to execute. It was the tense days in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the rover faced some boot-up sequence failure and was in the Safe mode. While it was in the safe mode, Engineers in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory performed the necessary solutions and the rover is now functioning correctly.

NASA engineers tried to wake up the Rover from Safe Mode by running the boot-up sequence for more than 30 times. After 30 times, the rover booted up and was working fine on the red planet. The Rover was brought back to the normal mode from Safe Mode on February 22nd. But as the rover is in the remote location where no hardware repair is possible, NASA stopped the mission and took time to evaluate the damage and usability of the rover. After convincing review of the rover hardware and software, NASA today announced that the rover is back from the Safe Mode and is ready to resume the exploration on the Mars.

On February 15th, the rover got stuck in the boot loop, a situation when the computer restarts continuously. Fortunately, the rover had two similar onboard computers to tackle such issues. NASA switched to the other computers and started the Safe mode sequence. As the rover was immobile in the safe mode, engineers assessed the problem and fixed it with a bunch of commands. As the immediate exploration was not advisable, the rover stayed at the same place, and today, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent commands to resume the research on Mars. As of now, NASA has not shared the details about the boot-up sequence failure.