NEW YORK: Researchers at NASA are looking for ways to improve the memory of the Mars exploration rover Opportunity after a number of recent glitches led to what company officials have called “amnesia” with its memory banks.
Opportunity may be an extremely sophisticated piece of rolling scientific hardware, and it may be functioning a decade beyond its specifications, but its “brain” is still a computer relying on much the same components as any PC circa 2003. As anyone who uses computers on a regular basis knows, these components have a limited service life, which is why junk drawers inevitably fill up with dead tech. Worse, the Martian environment is extremely hostile to electronics, and microelectronics especially, because the incredibly dry, dusty climate generates static electric charges, and the thin atmosphere and almost non-existent magnetic field lets in dangerous levels of cosmic radiation.
Whether due to time or radiation, NASA says that Opportunity is now suffering from bouts of computer senility. Like most computers, the rover’s uses a combination of volatile Random Access Memory (RAM), and a non-volatile memory – in this case, a set of seven flash memory banks. The latter are especially important because Opportunity is solar powered. This means that it can’t spare the power to keep the RAM operating at night because the batteries are needed to keep the electronics warm, so data collected during the day is stored in the flash memory until it can be transmitted to Earth.
