Aiming the spacecraft's antenna directly at the Earth enabled Surveyor to begin transmitting data using any one of its standard rates of 2000 bits per second or faster. Early next week, the flight team will transmit modifications to Surveyor's flight software to prevent the infinite-loop condition from occurring again. Surveyor would have been stable in safing for an indefinite period of time even if no corrective action had been taken. However, the flight team worked on restoring standard operations as quickly as possible because normal command sequences, such as those that control science calibration activities, are prohibited from executing in safe mode. After a mission elapsed time of 201 days from launch, Surveyor is 124.64 million kilometers from the Earth, 27.15 million kilometers from Mars, and is moving in an orbit around the Sun with a velocity of 22.89 kilometers per second.
All systems continue to be in excellent condition.