September 19, 2007 - NASA Mars Odyssey Enters Safe Mode

A software glitch caused the computer on the Mars Odyssey orbiter to reboot into "Safe Mode" last Monday.

When the onboard flight computer could not get a routine response from the system that monitors the spacecraft's orientation, a fault protection feature in the software told the flight computer to reboot and put the spacecraft into the standby status. In reality, the attitude-control task was operating just fine, but a messaging interface system got stuck, leaving the flight computer to assume the task was no longer running.

This has happened twice before.