Getting your player ready...
LOS ANGELES — The Phoenix lander’s first dig into the martian soil for scientific study was delayed Wednesday because of a communications glitch on a spacecraft that relays commands from Earth to the Red Planet.
The orbiting Odyssey satellite went into safe mode and failed to send instructions to Phoenix to claw into the permafrost to search for evidence of the building blocks of life, said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Odyssey will remain offline until Saturday, Edwards said.
