Kepler Recovers After 144 Hour "Glitch"

coondoggie writes "There was likely a pretty big sigh of relief at NASA's Ames Research Center this week as the group's star satellite Kepler recovered from a glitch that took it offline for 144 hours. According to NASA the glitch happened March 14, right after the spacecraft issued a network interface card (NIC) reset command to implement a computer program update. During the reset, the NIC sent invalid reaction wheel data to the flight software, which caused the spacecraft to enter safe mode, NASA stated."

Proof of extraterrestrial life!

[aardwolf64]

Alright, who hit F8 while it was booting up???

Re:Hay guys I got this one!

[LaminatorX]

It's not like this stuff is rocket science.

Oh, wait.

Tech Support

[Manos_Of_Fate]

Did they try turning it off and then on again?

plugged in?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell Tech Support: Hi! This is David from Colorado. How may I help you today?
NASA: Hi, Yes: Our satellite keeps freezing up on reboot.
Dell Tech Support: Allright let me pull up your information... ....
Dell Tech Support: Ok, sir, let's see if we can try and troubleshoot it over the phone, if not then you will have to ship it to our repair techs
NASA: ?????!?!?!?
Dell Tech Support: Allright let's start by checking for connection cables. Is the satellite plugged in to the outlet?
NASA: FUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WRT54G

[twebb72]

Turns out the NIC was working just fine. They had to power cycle the WRT54G in Houston to get it to reconnect.

Really long time

[owlstead]

Wow, that was longer than it took me to update my old W2K laptop to run Visual Studio 2003 :)

Re:Tech Support

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not nearly as easy as it sounds in orbit.

Nothing sounds easy in a near vacuum.