NASA is going to try to disable some faulty flash memory on the Opportunity rover, which is over a decade into its planned three-month mission to explore Mars. Defects in one of the rover's seven banks of flash memory are causing a series of reboots and "amnesia" events that are making it difficult for the rover to continue its scientific mission.

Opportunity uses a combination of volatile memory and flash memory. The volatile memory is used to store data obtained by the scientific instruments, which is sent back to Earth prior to nightfall, when power is cut from the rover's solar panels. The flash memory is used to store telemetry and command information, which allow the rover to continue its mission as the next day starts. If the flash memory is faulty or unavailable, the rover has to do a reset and wait for new commands from Earth.

This started occurring with regularity by early December, prompting NASA to reformat the flash memory. Problems continued, however, and technicians eventually localized the issue to one of the banks of on-board flash memory that provide Opportunity with 2GB of storage. So NASA started to plan for a software patch that would deactivate that bank and allow the rover to function with the remaining six.

NASA's original announcement indicated that the rover could operate in RAM-only mode if necessary. But over the holidays, Opportunity stopped communicating with its controllers on Earth. Contact has been reestablished, but a NASA project manager told Discovery News that the software fix is still a few weeks away from being validated and ready to send to Mars.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved