NASA engineers are preparing a radical fix that could help the Opportunity Mars rover regain its fading faculties and continue its mission.
The rover, which has spent ten years rolling across the Martian plains, has been having memory problems for the last six months because the cells in its flash memory have been overwritten so many times they are starting to fail.
“Now we’re having these events we call “amnesia”, which is the rover trying to use the flash memory, but it wasn’t able to, so instead it uses the RAM,” Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas told Discovery News. “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.”
via The Register
