News

The investigation conducted today by the expert team confirmed the hypothesis of a memory problem on the side B of the spacecraft. It is also confirmed that all the other sub-systems are OK.

The investigation conducted today by the expert teams (with the telemetry captured just before the reconfiguration) confirmed the hypothesis of a memory problem on the side B of the spacecraft (PM-B). The root cause of the safe hold mode (SHM) is a simple Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) not corrected by the software and -maybe- caused by a degraded memory location.

It is also confirmed that all the other sub-systems are OK.

Regarding the current activities, we have taken the opportunity of the reconfiguration (we are currently on PM-A) to apply one recommendation from the April 2013 REVEX. "at the first opportunity, try to collect information in order to understand the March SHM".  

In that context, an on-board software patch was prepared has been uploaded and executed during 3 orbits in order to check the memory; the results show a memory address with a permanent error and further analysis are requested to establish the link between that failure and the SHM.    

The satellite is currently in a safe and stable Sun-pointing configuration and will remain in that state during the week end. NOAA ops team will monitor the spacecraft.

Activities will be resumed next Monday with tests of the PM-B memory (same as those conducted today on PM-A). Recovery activities will be then started with the objective to recover the full core mission by end of week 37.

 The next status update will be provided on Tuesday September 10th

Thierry Guinle of behalf of Jason-2 project managers from NOAA, EUMETSAT, JPL and CNES