A MYSTERY glitch has sent the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft into "safe mode" for the first time in its eight-year life. Now engineers face a race against time to diagnose the problem and fix the probe.
The spacecraft's troubles began on 30 July when its primary computer malfunctioned, transferring activities to a back-up system. Engineers rebooted the primary computer but left it in a protected mode. But then, on 26 August, the back-up computer also malfunctioned and tried to return control to the still-quarantined primary one. This put the entire spacecraft into "safe" mode, to protect it from further damage.
Top of the list of suspects is an eruption of electrified gas from the sun. Two years ago a similar blast knocked out the Martian radiation environment experiment on NASA's Mars Odyssey mission.
Engineers want to revive the computers this week because mission controllers would like to take one last ...
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