An information glitch aboard the Mars Phoenix lander has caused the loss of some non-essential images of the Red Planet and delayed the probe's work by 24 hours, NASA said on Thursday.

"The spacecraft is healthy and fully commandable, but we are proceeding cautiously until we understand the root cause of this event," said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

An unusually high volume of maintenance data on Tuesday left little room in the spacecraft's non-volatile flash memory, and the scientific data gathered that day was lost when the Phoenix powered down for the Martian night.

None of the lost data was high-priority information, JPL said, adding that it mainly consisted of images that can be retaken by the onboard camera.

To reduce stress on the flash memory capacity of the Phoenix, JPL late on Tuesday sent instructions suspending all new scientific gathering activities on the Phoenix for Wednesday.

The Phoenix team said it expected scientific information gathering to resume on Thursday, but that instead of storing the data in the flash memory it would be downlinked to Earth on the same Martian day, or sol, it is collected.

"We can continue doing science that does not rely on non-volatile memory," Goldstein said.

Most of the scientific data gathered since the start of the Phoenix mission has been downlinked to Earth on the same sol, he added, without requiring overnight storage, except on some occasions when additional data is left for morning transmission, as was the case on Tuesday.

Digging deeper

On Thursday, the Phoenix scientific team led by University of Arizona's Peter Smith planned to dig deeper in Martian soil with the probe's robotic arm, which looks like a back-hoe. They were also to take more images and weather readings.

Before the computer glitch arose, the Phoenix had been digging into the soil around it uncovering a bright surface about five to six centimetres below the soil that has greatly intrigued scientists: some believe it could be ice, others a salt deposit.

Scientists hoped the Phoenix would dig up more of this white material on Thursday for further analysis.

Samples of Martian soil analysed so far have yielded no trace of water, the team said earlier this week.

Tuesday's was the third technical glitch in the Phoenix mission since it landed near the Martian North pole on 25 May. The two previous ones involved two US satellites orbiting the Red Planet that relay information between the probe and Earth.

The three-month Phoenix mission is hoping to find evidence of the existence of water and life-supporting organic minerals in the polar region. It has been working for 22 sols — the Martian day lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds.

AFP