MAXICO: NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity has been working well into its golden years – after nearly 11 years roaming the Red Planet, it has survived more than 40 times past its warranty. But now, this trusty veteran explorer is experiencing some worrisome memory loss.
NASA recently described Opportunity’s problems as “persistent computer resets and ‘amnesia’ events,” specifically pointing to issues that are occurring when the robot tries to save data on its flash memory storage system. As a result, the robot has resorted to saving data by bypassing its flash memory and storing it on its random-access memory, RAM.
“The mission can continue without storing data to flash memory, and instead store data in volatile RAM,” said Project Manager John Callas at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California in a statement. “While we’re operating Opportunity in that mode, we are also working on an approach to make the flash memory usable again.”
The Opportunity team thinks an age-related fault is primarily affecting the flash memory of one of the robot’s seven memory banks. While the mission can continue, the team’s plan is to make the flash memory usable again by tricking the six-wheeled, 400lb rover into thinking it has six memory banks instead of seven.
“So now we’re having these events we call ‘amnesia,’” Callas explained to Discovery News. “Which is the rover trying to use the flash memory, but it wasn’t able to, so instead it uses the RAM… it stores telemetry data in that volatile memory, but when the rover goes to sleep and wakes up again, all [the data] is gone. So that’s why we call it amnesia – it forgets what it has done.”
NASA says the memory issue is causing the rover to reset itself, and in some cases it stops communicating with mission control altogether.
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