The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft stopped working due to human error

The malfunction started with a computer error that was transferred to the spacecraft five months before it stopped working

The American space agency, NASA said at the end of the week that it was human error that caused the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft to stop working a few months ago. The spacecraft, in a project costing 250 million dollars, stopped transmitting at the beginning of November, and now NASA has announced that changes made to the spacecraft's computer memory caused the battery to overheat.

The spacecraft, which served NASA for about a decade, transmitted to Earth thousands of images of Mars, which show that water flowed there in the past.

"The loss of the spacecraft resulted from a series of events related to a computer error made five months earlier, which caused the battery to fail," says Dolly Perkins from NASA.

During the last communication with the spacecraft on November 2, engineers instructed the Mars Global Surveyor to adjust the position of its solar collectors. However, while moving one of the receivers, one of its two batteries was exposed to the heat of the sun. Contact with the spacecraft was lost within 12 hours.

The spacecraft broke a record in orbiting Mars. It carried a powerful camera and transmitted 240 images to Houston, as well as mapping the mineralogy of Mars and surveying potential landing sites for future ground missions. The spacecraft's shutdown left scientists with three other spacecraft orbiting Mars - NASA's Mars Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey, and the European spacecraft Mars Express.

For information on the NASA website