Last week, the MRO spacecraft unexpectedly “safed.” This is when it reboots and puts itself into a precautionary mode; in this case it was in response to an unexpected voltage reading (more information in this press release about the safing). The engineers at JPL and Lockheed Martin spent long hours investigating the cause, making sure the spacecraft is healthy and unharmed (which it does appear to be), and cautiously getting things back to normal. I’ll jump right to the happy ending of the story, which is that we are now back to normal, imaging Mars as usual (here’s the press release about resuming routine operations).

What do the people at the HiRISE Operations Center (HiROC) do when the MRO spacecraft safes?
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Last week we had a rare event: HiRISE turned off! We call this safe mode, because it’s a safety measure built into the instrument’s software. Whenever any of the sensors starts going out of bounds, like temperatures or voltages, the instrument powers down to prevent damage to the electronics. In this case, one temperature sensor went over its upper limit of 35 degrees Celsius. It’s pretty disconcerting when something unexpected like this happens, but at least we know the instrument is protected.

We had the difficult detective job of figuring out what went wrong. It was clear early on that the instrument overheated, but we couldn’t figure out why. Our tool that predicts the temperatures (”HiTemp”) didn’t predict anything that hot. We didn’t take a really large image, which would heat us up (at least, nothing bigger than normal! ). The local operations team worked with the health & safety people, the spacecraft engineers at LMA, and some of the software developers at Ball Aerospace that originally designed HiRISE. Together we all investigated the problem.

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Well, the transition imaging phase is now over, and us folks at HiROC are reflecting on lessons learned. We’re coming to realize that our joy of getting images for this one week will occur constantly for our two year primary science phase, and perhaps even much longer than that. Wow! It’s almost difficult to comprehend!

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We are now receiving the telemetry from the second image taken today from HiRISE. Everything from the spacecraft says that the second image was taken successfully. We are still awaiting the first image to come through, the quick look timer expires soon, meaning that we will be able to have our first look at the image sometime in the next few hours. Stay tuned for more.

I certainly breathed a sigh of relief when we got confirmation from the telemetry that our first image was successfully acquired. Now we’re waiting in suspense to actually receive the image here at HiROC (HiRISE Operations Center). We have some computers set up in the center room so that we can all crowd around and see the image this afternoon.

I share an office with some of our downlink operations people, and right now I’m listening to them discuss their plans for the image processing that will take place this afternoon. They can tell you more about the details of the processing, but essentially right now they are making sure that all the plans and procedures are in place so that things go smoothly this afternoon. The last couple of days have been filled with testing, testing, and more testing.

We just received the telemetry to confirm that the HiRISE camera took its first picture!!! We all gathered around a screen projecting the telemetry data, and everyone cheered as the numbers came in. We’ll have to wait another ~6 hours or so to actually receive the image… The images go from the spacecraft to the DSN network, then to JPL, then to us.