NASA's Curiosity rover made it all the way to Mars without major setbacks, but now a computer glitch has stopped the robotic vehicle in its tracks.
The malfunction was detected Wednesday night, causing corrupted data in Curiosity's main computer, according to a written statement released by the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. Scientific investigations have been put on hold, and the rover is now operating in its minimally active "safe mode."
But don't worry: Curiosity will be up and running smoothly in "the next few days," according to the statement. The rover carries a backup computer -- known as "B-side" -- for just such an emergency, and engineers have switched over to it while they work to repair the main computer.
The JPL team noticed something was amiss when the rover failed to enter its power-saving "sleep mode," a configuration it enters nightly. After the discovery of the corrupted data, a team dedicated to "anomaly resolution" recommended the computer swap.
Why didn't the Curiosity team detect the bug when they were testing the $2.5 billion rover?
Maybe because this was no ordinary glitch -- in fact, it may have resulted from high-energy cosmic rays striking the computer, Richard Cook, Curiosity's project manager, told National Geographic.
Curiosity will have to wait until the computer glitch is fixed before it continues with its latest project -- analyzing the chemical composition of a sample of the Red Planet's dirt.
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