Meghan is a senior writer at Space.com and has more than five years' experience as a science journalist based in New York City. She joined Space.com in July 2018, with previous writing published in outlets including Newsweek and Audubon. Meghan earned an MA in science journalism from New York University and a BA in classics from Georgetown University, and in her free time she enjoys reading and visiting museums. Follow her on Twitter at @meghanbartels.
can assess the situation. Sometimes, the solution is simple, the cosmic equivalent of rebooting an internet router."The safe mode event was — catastrophic is too strong, but I mean, we did get close to losing the spacecraft," Curry said, calling the incident"incredibly serious" and"scary." And when the team wanted to be celebrating the end of the six-month mission extension campaign, the timing stung."It was like getting the wind knocked out of you.
After worrying IMU-1 issues cropped up in late 2017, the MAVEN team switched the spacecraft to its backup unit. But late last year, the team noticed that the IMU-2 unit was starting to, essentially, wear out much faster than expected. So in early February, the team returned the spacecraft to its original IMU-1 unit.
The first challenge was to stabilize the spacecraft, which required a procedure engineers call heartbeat termination. The spacecraft had other ideas. Once MAVEN was stable on IMU-2, the team scrambled to develop all-stellar mode as quickly as possible, completing the process in time to send the relevant commands to the spacecraft on April 19, just shy of two months after the crisis began.
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