Mars Spacecraft Device Works Again

An instrument carried by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft to measure Martian radiation began gathering science data Wednesday, seven months after it suddenly stopped communicating with flight controllers, NASA said. Engineers who had been trouble-shooting the problem since late February finally reestablished communication with the device, which stopped working in August.

The problem is believed to involve a memory error in the instrument’s on-board software, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said. Roger Gibbs, the Odyssey project manager at JPL, said that fixing communications with the instrument means that the spacecraft’s entire payload is now working.