Ano właśnie, nasza sonda jest w trybie awaryjnym. Miejmy nadzieję, że bez żadnych problemów uda się przywrócić ją do pełnej operacyjności. To chyba pierwsza tego typu sytuacja?
Nie pierwsza, jeżeli dobrze kojarzę, to już szósta.
Tutaj jest trochę o przyczynach wejścia w safe mode.
I jeszcze trochę angielskiego tekstu z 3 listopada:
On Tuesday, DOY 306, the Spacecraft Operations team was performing a real time command procedure to load the backup AACS Flight Computer-A (AFC-A) with the new AACS A8.8.0 flight software from the Solid State Recorder (SSR) when a sudden loss of downlink occurred, halting the procedure. The DSN station at Canberra, Australia, DSS-45, provided support during the loss of downlink and confirmed execution of High Gain Antenna (HGA) safing. It was later determined that a command had been corrupted by a flipped bit and caused a non-maskable interrupt error in the prime Command and Data Subsystem A (CDS-A). CDS-A performed a reset which correctly resulted in CDS-B becoming prime. The spacecraft safing algorithm was run, which terminated all active programs and shut down all nonessential power loads, including all science instruments, and resulting in deactivation of the executing S64 background sequence. The spacecraft then turned to Sun-point and switched to the low gain antenna. This caused DSS-45 to lose lock on the downlink signal at 2010-306T23:56 UTC / Tuesday, Nov. 2 at 4:56 pm PST. An hour later, the HGA Swap response executed and communication was restored through the high gain antenna and DSS-45 was able to acquire the 1896 bps engineering telemetry downlink.
Recovery efforts continued today, with 12 command files being sent to the spacecraft. These files set the uplink rate back to 500 bps, turned on ranging, powered on the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument to get it to a safe thermal state, turned on the prime pressurant control assembly line heater, enabled Autonomous Thermal Control #6, enabled the HGA Swap monitor, cleared system fault protection statistics, and read out various AACS and CDS memories for diagnostic purposes.