Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter In-flight Anomalies and Lessons Learned: An Update

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission has as its primary objectives: advance our understanding of the current Mars climate, the processes that have formed and modified the surface of the planet and the extent to which water has played a role in surface processes; identify sites of possible aqueous activity indicating environments that may have been or are conducive to biological activity; and thus identify and characterize sites for future landed missions; and provide forward and return relay services for current and future Mars landed assets. MRO's crucial role in the long term strategy for Mars exploration requires a high level of reliability during its 5.4 year mission. This requires an architecture which incorporates extensive redundancy and cross-strapping. Because of the distances and hence light-times involved, the spacecraft itself must be able to utilize this redundancy in responding to time-critical failures. For cases where fault protection is unable to recognize a potentially threatening condition, either due to known limitations or software flaws, intervention by ground operations is required. These aspects of MRO's design were discussed in a previous paper [Ref. 1]. This paper provides an update to the original paper, describing MRO's significant in-flight anomalies over the past year, with lessons learned for redundancy and fault protection architectures and for ground operations.