The navigation team, however, reported Monday that the spacecraft was still on course for arrival at Mars on Aug. 24, 1993. At this time, the fourth trajectory correction maneuver, which was planned as a backup maneuver to correct any errors in the final trajectory to Mars, does not appear to be necessary. All spacecraft subsystems are operating well. The science payload will be powered on now that the spacecraft has been restored to normal cruise mode. The spacecraft is stable in Array Normal Spin.
Indications are that all spacecraft subsystems are performing well.
The Flight Team has been carefully monitoring Attitude Control subsystem performance since return to ANS on Monday evening. It is generally felt that this type of event would have been sufficient to cause the spacecraft to lose inertial reference prior to the star processing software fix made Monday evening. Telemetry indicates that they are performing well. Recreation of the problem in a test environment allows teams the opportunity to confirm that the star processing software fix uplinked earlier this week resolves the problems which had been causing recurring fault protection activation. The spacecraft is stable in Array Normal Spin.