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NASA To Reformat Opportunity Rover’s Memory From 125 Million Miles Away
After more than a decade roaming the Red Planet, NASA’s Opportunity rover needs to have its flash memory reformatted in order to resolve computer resets that are interfering with the rover’s science activities.
“Flash-memory induced resets have increased in occurrence, preventing meaningful science until this problem can be corrected,” NASA said in an update. The resets, which number a dozen during the month of August, have been occurring with increasing frequency, prompting the rover team to make plans for reformatting the rover’s flash memory.
“The flash reformatting is a low-risk process, as critical sequences and flight software are stored elsewhere in other non-volatile memory on the rover,” according to John Callas, project manager for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project.
Flash memory is a type of storage commonly used in smartphones and othe digital devices. Over time, individual memory cells can be worn-out due to repeated use. Reformatting erases the memory and identifies bad memory cells so they can be marked to be avoided.
This will be the first time Opportunity’s flash memory has been reformatted since it landed on Mars, currently around 125 million miles away from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. However, this kind of maintenance has been performed before with the rover’s twin, Spirit, back in 2009 to resolve a series of, what NASA is calling, “amnesia events.”
Opportunity, which recently set the record for the longest distance traveled by a rover on another world, has been operating on Mars for over 10 years. If all goes to plan, the little rover that could will be roaming the Red Planet for many years to come.