Every time a virus hits your computer system you feel exposed and vulnerable, but its nothing like what the scientists guiding Mars rover Curiosity from Earth are feeling right now. It seems that the computers on board the Curiosity rover have had to be put into “Safe Mode” to counter a computer glitch that they encountered.

NASA has had to call a halt to the research work which Curiosity was involved in because of a memory malfunction in the on board computer on the rover last week. They discovered the fault when the computer did not hit the daily sleep mode as planned and programmed into it. Thankfully the computer has a back up on board and the scientists switched to the back up computer while they are trying to solve the problem on the active one.

The back up computer will be reconfigured and the rover will move from Safe Mode to Operational Mode when that is finished, hopefully within a week. The remaining research projects will then be carried out. The NASA engineers on Earth will also continue to work on the science project involving the computer glitch in the main computer on the Mars rover to solve the problem of the flash memory being corrupted.