NASA: Opportunity rover endures “amnesia event”

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WASHINGTON: According to a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory statement the durable Opportunity rover suffered a brief loss of flash memory following a reformatting a week prior. Fortunately, the amnesia event did not destroy any scientific information. The rover was able to resume normal operations shortly thereafter and continued studying a rock known as Athens with its robotic arm.
During the years of its stint on Mars, Opportunity has suffered many similar brief losses of memory and a few flash memory problems that necessitated resets of the rover’s computer. Due to these problems, the mission team switched the rover to a mode in which it did not use its flash memory in December 2014. Before this stop-gap measure, the rover had to undergo multiple computer resets every day.
Thus, mission managers reformatted the flash memory on March 20 to avoid using Bank 7, which has been the root of several previous issues with the flash memory. Opportunity should have been able to use the other six banks normally. However, five days after the reformatting, this latest amnesia event occurred. The underlying cause of the problems still has not been determined.
The flash memory allows Opportunity to retain data even when it is powered down, as it is every night to save energy captured by its solar panels. In addition to flash memory, Opportunity has volatile memory, which stores information while the rover is operating. After the decision not to use flash memory in December 2014, Opportunity relied on its volatile memory to store scientific information to be downloaded to Earth every night before powering down.
“Although we are a little disappointed at the occurrence of an amnesia event only five days after reformatting, we are not surprised. There is still no clear understanding of what is causing the problems. Only time will tell if we have been successful in mitigating the most serious flash problems,” said John Callas, Opportunity project manager at the JPL.