Mars curiosity rover suffers hiccup; NASA puts science experiments on hold

New Delhi : There is something wrong with NASA's Opportunity Rover on Mars it is not beaming science data back to Earth. It's been over 100 days that the red planet is facing huge dust storm, which seems to be affecting the Curiosity since 15 September. 

The files stored on hardy rover's on-board memory seem to be having problems and the issue is linked to its internal filing systems, says NASA. As such, scientists on the earth have put Curiosity on stand down from all science missions till technicians figure out what is wrong with the rover, reports Space.com.

According to Curiosity's deputy project manager Steve Lee of JPL, the problem seems to be in the rover's internal filing systems. Lee went on to explain that the ground team is narrowing it down and potential causes are being looked into, but they are yet to determine whether the problem is hardware or software related

Other than this glitch, the rover is otherwise doing well, notes the report. In fact, it is still constantly sending back engineering data, which NASA terms as useful in diagnosing the file and memory errors. That means this error, said Lee, is not a time-critical one, unlike the computer issues that Curiosity faced just 200 Mars days (Sols) after landing on Mars in August 2012.

While the current memory issue is a complex one, Curiosity team have several options to deal with this issue.

Problems related to memory hardware can be worked out for any portions of the memory banks that are no longer operating, said Lee. If the issue is software related, "a fix can be devised to upgrade Curiosity's onboard flight software..." There is a backup computer available, called the A Side, it has less available memory because of the Sol 200 incident, he said.

"During the Sol 200 anomaly," said Lee, "the rover was not responding to commands, nor was it sleeping to recharge its battery."