NASA is determined to solve some memory issues it has found in its Mars rover Opportunity, which has spent the past 10 years exploring the Red Planet.
The culprit for the rover's problems with flash memory is believed to be connected to the machine's age, and the Opportunity team thinks it can fix the faulty part by hacking into the rover's software, according to BBC News.
John Callas, project manager at NASA, said Opportunity uses two types of memory: volatile, which can be accessed quickly but needs power to save stored data, and non-volatile, which can save data even when powered down, making it a better option for long-term storage.
The issue, which has caused the rover to sometimes reset itself or stop communicating with mission control, is with the rover's volatile memory and is most likely linked to the age of the hardware.
Callas explained that the issues the rover experienced with flash memory weren't that big in the beginning, but as the years went on, the issues have gotten more serious, Discovery News reported.
"So 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 ... 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," he said.
By hacking into Opportunity's software, NASA believes it can get the rover to ignore the malfunctioning part in its flash memory and write to the healthy hardware from now on, BBC News reported.
Callas said it will take a couple weeks to fix the problem, but added that Opportuntiy is getting old and may be on its last run.
"It's like you have an aging parent, that is otherwise in good health- maybe they go for a little jog every day, play tennis each day- but you never know, they could have a massive stroke right in the middle of the night," he said. "So we're always cautious that something could happen."
Opportunity has covered 26 miles of Mars' surface since it landed on the planet a decade ago, providing a plethora of biological information along the way.
