Curiosity's Fault Tolerant Wakeup and Shutdown Design

Abstract

Curiosity spends roughly 70% of the day “sleeping”, in order to recharge the batteries from the nuclear power source. The system is designed to ensure the Rover goes to sleep and wakes back up to continue science and engineering activities. Additionally, the design is robust to off-nominal situations that may need additional actions performed by both hardware and software to ensure the Rover can communicate with the Earth. This paper describes nominal and off-nominal behavioral patterns, fault tolerance features designed into the Rover system (hardware and software), several off-nominal scenarios that are accommodated by the design, and some lessons learned from this development effort.