Opportunity rover memory format

Opportunity - if not a record for extraterrestrial mileage (as far as can be judged, the Soviet Lunar Rover keeps the lead in this matter, although NASA thinks differently), then certainly the record holder for staying on another planet of the Solar System will remain operable.

As you know, the systems were originally calculated to work for 90 days, and more than 10 years have passed since the landing of Opportunity on Mars. Rover systems wear out, and this is especially noticeable in relation to the rover's flash memory.
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The fact is that in the last month the rover gives out one failure after another, and it takes a day or two to restore each such failure. Consequently, the apparatus does nothing for a whole day or two. When such a failure occurs, the rover computer system restarts, and NASA specialists have to spend a lot of time solving all these problems. Over the last month, Opportunity has already rebooted 12 times, so it’s easy to calculate how long the machine has been working and how much it has been idle.

According to representatives of NASA, problems arise because of attempts to write data to non-working cells of the device’s flash memory. Reformatting the memory, in this case, with a high degree of probability, is a successful procedure that allows you to mark corrupted parts of the memory so that the rover’s computer system does not try to write anything to such cells.

For all ten years, Opportunity's memory will be formatted for the first time, and from a distance of more than 200 million kilometers. However, a similar procedure was already carried out with the twin Opportuntity, the Spirit rover, in 2009, just five years after primarseniya.



As for the Opportunity, the reformatting procedure will be carried out next month. Currently, the rover aspires to the Marathon Valley of Mars, where a lot of clay minerals (the latter can "tell" about the geological history of the planet, scientists hope to get even more information about the presence of liquid water on the surface of the Red Planet in the past).

Via nasa