NASA’s Mars Opportunity Rover is currently experiencing some strange technical difficulties that are resulting in ‘memory loss.’ This means that somehow, the data on the rover has become corrupted to a degree and that it is forgetting vital information about what it has taken pictures of and examined on the red planet. This could be described best as a form of spacecraft amnesia.
The space researchers and software engineers that have currently been working on the Opportunity Rover have high hopes that it will improve and be able to function properly very soon. They were able to implement a software patch that they believed would fix the problem, but merely five days later, the Opportunity Rover is showing signs of this memory loss once again.
Opportunity was one of two rovers that NASA sent to Mars back in 2004, and has been hard at work studying this magnificent red planet ever since.
They also sent a second rover, Spirit to help with this particular mission. They are both part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover program and are designed to run on batteries for easier management. Both rovers are capable of storing many photos and data collected from the surface of Mars and this information is then transmitted to the space scientists here on Earth.
Currently, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) helps to manage this particular project for NASA and is doing all it can to help with the Opportunity Rover’s repair process. The goal is to have it back up and running as soon as possible. The people who are currently working on the repair believe that they have located the problem as being with one of the Opportunity Rover’s memory banks. It appears that there is a corrupt flash data bank within the spacecraft that is causing these bouts of amnesia.
NASA has so far been successful with its current missions to Mars and wants to keep the pace going. By using both the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers, NASA has been able to stay on top of the studies of Mars for many years. There is debate about whether the Opportunity Rover should be retired and taken out of the mission, but the space scientists are not convinced of that yet.
The different space scientists and researchers working at NASA have seen a lot of different issues come up with various missions. They want to make sure that there is no recourse to fix NASA’s beloved Opportunity Rover before they completely shut it down. The hope is that with some more work and research into the machine, a solution will be reached very soon. While NASA’s rovers are able to gather a lot of information and great data from Mars, they are under stressful conditions with the atmosphere of Mars being the way that it is, full of gasses. This can play havoc on the rover’s machinery. The idea is to help the Opportunity Rover get back on its feet so that it can continue to provide NASA with great information for many years to come.
