Some science activities have already resumed after being temporarily suspended last month following a series of faults related to the onboard data storage system.
Having arrived around Mars in December 2003 for an initial two-year mission, the spacecraft is now in its eighth year of science operations.
It has returned some of the most stunning images and valuable science data ever obtained from the Red Planet.
In mid-October 2011, anomalies in the operation of its Solid-State Mass Memory (SSMM) system caused science observations to be temporarily halted.
The problem had surfaced several weeks earlier, when, on several occasions, the spacecraft autonomously entered safe mode.
This is an operational mode designed to safeguard both the spacecraft and its instrument payload in the event of internal faults or errors.
Data storage problems
The cause was a complex combination of events relating to reading from and writing to memory modules in the SSMM system.
This is used to store data acquired by the instruments and housekeeping data from the spacecraft's subsystems, prior to transmission to Earth.
It is also used to store commands that have been received from ground stations while awaiting execution.
“This problem was unanticipated by the spacecraft designers, so everyone on the mission control team is learning as we go.”
The mission control team at ESOC, ESA's Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, have been working closely with technical experts from the spacecraft's manufacturer as well as other experts at ESA to troubleshoot and isolate the problem.
However, it has not been possible to date to understand nor resolve the problem with the SSMM directly.
Therefore the team are now designing a series of new procedures that will enable commands to be stored without critical dependency on the problem-plagued SSMM.
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