NASA’s Opportunity developed fault in its flash memory, engineers plan to reprogram rover

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FRANCE: NASA’s first sortie into sending unmanned automatic rovers to Mars may be getting a new lease on life thanks to some clever programming.
Conceived and launched while its more advanced younger brother Curiosity was still just a twinkle in NASA’s eye, Opportunity has been gathering data from the Red Planet for over a decade now. NASA has been pleased and somewhat shocked that the little rover has been operating so well for so long – something like 40 times longer than its expected operational mission – which is why it’s come as no surprise that the rover is finally developing some glitches.
John Callas, the project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission – the official name of the mission Opportunity and its now long-dead twin rover Spirit were sent on – says that the rover has developed a fault in its flash memory. There are seven banks of memory aboard the little craft, and the seventh is starting to fail, Callas went on to say.
lash memory – essentially the same technology used in digital storage cards for smartphones, digital cameras, and in USB thumb drives – eventually wears out, Callas explained. In fact there’s only so many times data can be written, erased and re-written before it begins to give out – and Callas says that’s exactly what’s happening to Opportunity.
However, NASA researchers have come up with an ingenious method to give Opportunity a bit more life. Since the faulty flash memory module is the last in the series, NASA engineers plan to reprogram the rover to ignore its seventh memory bank and only use the first six. It’s apparently a very easy fix that will allow Opportunity to continue to function without glitches for the time being – at least until some of its other memory banks begin to fail – but with nearly 11 years on the surface of Mars, all the information the little rover sends back to NASA is just icing on the cake.