For all you Curiosity Rover fans out there who have been enjoying the wonders this man made martian robot has been doing, there is a bad news. NASA has announced that due to the corrupted memory files on the rover they have put it into a safe mode.
The Curiosity Rover is currently in the safe mode with a backup computer while NASA is fixing the corrupted files on its primary computer, which has been put on hold for now. NASA is working on determining what’s wrong with the files so it can perform viable fixes to its system. Although the Curiosity Rover is currently using the backup computer in the safe mode which is serving as a replacement to the primary one it could still take several days to supply enough information so that the ‘failsafe’ could take over.
It is due to such situations a backup computer with similar functionalities as the primary computer is added to the device. If there was no backup computer then the rover would have become un-useful. Of course NASA could take such a risk with this valuable piece of machinery.
Also it cannot be said with certainty that NASA will be able to fix the primary computer. In which case it would have to rely on the backup one only for the future. NASA is said to be working to harden the code against future flaws.
The Curiosity rover is a $2.5 billion project of NASA which was launched in space back in November 2011. It landed on the Mars in August 2012 and since then has been providing useful information about the planet.