Old Opportunity Knocks Around On Mars, Suffers Brief Spell Of Amnesia
Problems have plagued Opportunity for some time, as might be expected considering the rover's age and the conditions in which it serves, and last August the decision was made to reformat its flash memory in the hope that this would cure frequently occurring system resets. Individual cells in each section of its flash memory had been overwritten so many times by this point that Opportunity was resetting itself dozens of times a month. And with the rover's flash memory no longer felt to be reliable, NASA in December took steps to instead have the rover use volatile memory to fire off its daily data load to Earth before shutting down for the night to preserve its power.
“We changed how the rover uses flash memory in an attempt to correct problems the rover had been experiencing,” said NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Opportunity project manager John Callas. “Although we are a little disappointed at the occurrence of an amnesia event only five days after reformatting, we are not surprised. There is still no clear understanding of what is causing the problems. Only time will tell if we have been successful in mitigating the most serious flash problems.”
* NASA reported last week that Opportunity had clocked over 42.195 kilometers, thus extending its rover traversal record to the distance of a marathon (and needing just 11 years to accomplish the feat).