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Mars orbiter reported facing a potentially fatal scenario, Arizona Star
"While the engineers have not been able to find the root cause of why the orbiter did so on Aug. 26, they are seeing a pattern among the four occurrences this year. "In all four cases the most likely scenario is that ... either one of the voltages wasn't right or the part of the device that measures voltages indicated there was a problem and there wasn't one," Erickson said."
Print this articleMy understanding, which might be wrong, is that MRO is currently not damaged. The big issues seem to be, first, that MRO is frequently going into safe mode - this is the fourth time this year. Secondly, an unlikely but possible combination of problems could occur which would result in MRO being put into an unrecoverable state, ending the mission.
It looks like MRO is being intentionally kept in safe mode until a fix for these problems can be developed. It does seem to be taking a long time, but it's best to be cautious right now.
If MRO were to be lost, that could be a serious problem for the beleagured MSL mission. MRO is supposed to be used as a data relay. The loss of MRO could result in a significant decrease in the amount of data that MSL could return.
I believe the cancellation of the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter has already constrained data returns compared to what was originally planned, and loss of MRO would make it that much worse. Odyssey and Mars Express could still act as relays if they're still there for MSL, and direct communications would still be possible, but that wouldn't be as good as using MRO to relay data.
2 Comments
On the bright side, MRO has served us well