A veteran NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars has gone into safe mode
after a glitch was detected in one of its reaction wheels. The
Mars Odyssey orbiter officially put itself into the protective
standby mode early Friday, when the spacecraft detected unusual
readings from one of its three reaction wheels, which are used
to control the orbiter's orientation in space. "The spacecraft
is safe, and information we've received from it indicates the
problem is limited to a single reaction wheel," the orbiter's
mission manager Chris Potts of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "The path forward is
evaluating the health of the reaction wheel and our options for
proceeding." The orbiter carries a spare reaction wheel onboard,
in case one of the three in use fails. For now, the flight
control team on the ground is in communication with the
spacecraft while they decide what steps to take next and develop
a recovery timeline. Space news from NBCNews.com Mars Odyssey
has been studying the