Mars suffers radio blackout
NASA boffins are busy scratching their heads after both of their Mars orbiters suffered a case of the gremlins.
Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are acting up - disrupting communications with the two plucky Martian rovers on the surface.
At the weekend, the Odyssey registered a memory error and sent the spacecraft into "safe mode", which minimises spacecraft operations.
Its back-up - the Orbiter - has been dawdling on stand-by since August after the probe spontaneously rebooted for the fourth time this year.
The solar-powered Mars rovers can communicate with antennas on Earth directly, says New Scientist, but the orbiters can relay information from the rovers to Earth at more than ten times that speed, using a fraction of the energy.
The outages could delay attempts to free the Spirit rover from a sand pit that has been its home for more than six months. The rover team has been given until February to extricate Spirit.
Nasa is confident of getting Odyssey back on its feet by the end of the week, though the Orbiter is going to need a lot more computer jiggery-pokery before it can be brought online.
Weird Science Factoid: The temperature of the Earth's interior increases by one degree every 60ft down. So get digging the winter!
Join the Weird Science Facebook group here, or follow us on Twitter here or by searching for weirdsciblog.
Want to be sent the 'best' of the Weird Sci Blog every month? Then sign up for Weird News - a newsletter containing more info about the subjects we cover, plus some extra stuff that didn't make the blog. Interested? Subscribe by e-mailing wscience@me.com with the title 'count me in' and we'll do the rest.
Older/Newer
« Remains of destroyed planet found in Antarctic | Ancient, ancient art »
Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
