JPL technicians have sent a command to Curiosity to switch to the second computer, since the one currently in operation can no longer store data before sending them to Earth.
Fortunately the possibility of a failure of the main computer had already been predicted by installing two computers instead of one.
This operation had already been carried out after the Sol 200, five years ago, due to an abnormal power consumption that risked making the rover ungovernable. At that time the technicians were able to switch from computer A to computer B, allowing the engineers to identify a part of the memory that was responsible for the abnormal power consumption and to disable it.
There are therefore good chances that switching to computer A will be able to restore the functionality of Curiosity, although it is not yet known how long the operation will last. This change should however be temporary, since the computer A has much less memory than the computer B, but at least from the computer A you can try to identify precisely the nature of the problem at computer B and possibly solve it.
In the meantime we can only hope that everything goes well, waiting to receive again images and scientific information directly from the surface of the Gale crater.
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.