Three-hour presentation t
o NASA leadership about the MAVEN Mars orbiter's future was supposed to be the biggest challenge for the mission team
But just as the
presentation was going smoothly on Earth, the spacecraft itself was in serious trouble millions of miles away.
AS soon as the meeting end
,Shannon Curry recently appointed principal investigator for the MAVEN mission, got a call from project manager saying 'We're in safe mode.'
Safe mode means
that a spacecraft has run into a problem it can't solve on its own
Sometimes, the solution
is simple, the cosmic equivalent of rebooting an internet router.But not this time.
So Maven has shut down
everything it doesn't need to survive until engineers on Earth can assess the situation.