It has been a rough few weeks for Jupiter’s orbiting spacecraft, Juno, but things are looking up.
Mission controllers brought the NASA spacecraft out of safe mode Monday night ending the period of uncertainty for the $1 billion mission, designed to study Jupiter and its origins.
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"Juno exited safe mode as expected, is healthy and is responding to all our commands,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager in a news release. "We anticipate we will be turning on the instruments in early November to get ready for our December flyby."
Juno went into safe mode unexpectedly on Oct. 18 when a software performance monitor kicked the spacecraft’s computer into reboot.
There is safe mode, if something else went wrong it would enter emergency mode, the next failure would have meant the spacecraft is lost.
Take it from another mission team who have also experienced a problem millions of miles away.
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft went into emergency mode in April, but after a very long weekend and not much sleep, the team was able to regain communication with the spacecraft and it's now back to hunting exoplanets.
But the scare for Kepler wasn’t the first and this wasn’t Juno’s either.
Earlier this month, mission managers decided to postpone an engine firing, after a pair of valves in the spacecraft's propulsion system didn't open as expected.
Juno was scheduled to fire its engine moving into 14-day orbits from 53-day trips around the giant gas planet, but two valves didn’t open as planned, NASA said in a mission update.
The valves are an important part of the engine firing process, said Juno project manager Rick Nybakken.
The problem delayed Juno’s close flyby of Jupiter until December.
NASA said the two problems weren't related.
Juno’s team is still investigating the cause of the reboot and examining two engine check valves.
The solar-powered spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter since July, after a five-year journey. The spacecraft launched in 2011, from Cape Canaveral.