This happened last Monday and since then the scientists have managed to improve the spacecraft's data transfer rate, but have not yet returned it to an operational state
The Mars rover MRO (or Mars Rover) reactivated itself without warning on Monday this week, February 23, and since then it has automatically switched to a safe mode where its activity is limited, a safety response to anomalies such as cosmic radiation damage to electronic components. This is the fifth time since the spacecraft arrived at Mars in August 2005 that it has undergone such a process. However, the symptoms of the last event do not match any of the previous events in which she entered a safe state.
"We are about to return the spacecraft to normal operations," said Jim Erickson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, MRO project manager. "The process will last at least a few days."
A safe mode is a series of programmed commands for the spacecraft that start to go into action in the event of a specific situation to which the system does not know how to react.
MRO engineers are looking into several possible causes for the incident as they plan to prepare the spacecraft to resume its scientific activities around Mars. Since the incident, the spacecraft computer has not been required to reboot. In the meantime, the engineers carried out actions that allowed the spacecraft to increase the data transfer rate from 40 bits per second (as happens when it goes into safe mode to 400 thousand. The engineers want to identify whether the scenario occurred in which a cosmic ray hit a component that caused high readings of electrical voltage for 9 microseconds , is enough to cause the computer to boot.
