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ESA Science News
http://sci.esa.int

24 Jun 2003

Rescheduling of some Beagle 2 'cruise check-out' tests

The instruments on board ESA's mission to Mars, Mars Express, are in
the process of being tested to verify that they have survived the
launch successfully and will work properly. One of these tests on the
Mars Express lander, Beagle 2, has been postponed to the first week
of July 2003. 

This will give engineers extra time to investigate a temporary
anomaly that occurred in a memory unit, the so-called Solid State
Mass Memory (SSMM). The SSMM stores data from the instruments before
sending them to Earth. 

This anomaly happened last week during the test of OMEGA, one of Mars
Express instruments. For a short period of time, the output of one
part of the SSMM contained errors. The problem disappeared
spontaneously. The affected memory unit is now working properly. To
preserve the data which are stored in this part of the memory, while
trying to understand why it occurred, the instrument checks have been
rescheduled. 

These kind of events are considered routine in a space mission, but
engineers would like to understand the causes before restarting the
instrument tests.

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