Representatives of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that they had to suspend the mission of the Martian scientific laboratory "Curiosity" as a result of technical problems encountered by the Mars Rover on November 17. The official statement says that scientists have discovered unexpected power surges in one of the systems of the computer rover circuit and are currently searching for possible sources that caused this problem. At that time, it was decided to suspend all Curiosity research operations.
A possible explanation for the cause of the malfunction is that the "Curiosity" experienced a so-called short-term "soft" electrical circuit. If this is true, then there is a possibility that the monotonous robot-researcher will expect in the future to repeat these problems.
The operators of Curiosity explain: unlike the “hard” electrical circuit, when two wires are connected directly, a “soft” short circuit occurs due to a current leakage through a poorly conducting electrical medium.
“The car is now safe and fully ready to continue its work, however, we decided to play it safe and find out what was the reason for this“ soft ”short-circuit,” said NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory expert and leading Curiosity project manager Jim Erikson .
A short circuit occurred between the 32-volt power bus (the main transmission line of electricity throughout the robot) and the chassis of the rover. After landing on the Red Planet, the voltage between the chassis and the power bus was 11 volts, dropping from 16 volts. However, in general, this did not interfere with the work of the rover. After 460 Martian days (solo), last Sunday the bus voltage dropped to 4 volts. But now the rover is out of danger.
When the engineers developed the Curiosity, they took into account the possibility of reducing the voltage, which would allow the rover to do its job even in the event of such unexpected trouble. By the way, when landing on Mars, the "Curiosity" experienced the same "soft" short-circuit. And nothing, "survived." The voltage problem did not cause the robot to switch to safe mode, in which he spent almost the entire past week as a result of an unplanned reboot caused by overheating of computer systems after downloading the updated software. The trouble is that such closures reduce the resistance of the apparatus to similar problems in the future.
At the moment, NASA and JPL engineers cannot give an accurate answer to the question of whether the updated software could have caused this closure.
The article is based on materials .
Comments
Post a Comment