Telemetry failure.
Probably just an intermittant failure in the AE35 unit.
You'd have thought that the on-board computer's failure prediction algorithms would have picked up on that one and got someone to fix it in advance though.....
The rig is up. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission launched successfully and precisely on schedule – at 10:02am Eastern time on Saturday morning (3:02pm UTC), but within minutes ran into telemetry problems. The MSL spacecraft, which carries within it NASA's big-as-a-Mini-Cooper, nuclear-powered, experiment-stuffed …