Opportunity rover memory successfully reformatted

The path traveled is close to the marathon race

The NASA team reformatted the permanent storage device of the Opportunity Mars rover after three months, during which it was necessary to manage storage of data only in volatile RAM.

On March 20, confirmation was received that the reformatting procedure was successful. Prior to this, this month, the rover switched to the use of an updated version of the software , which avoids using the problematic seventh memory bank aboard the device.

The flash memory of the rover wears out, in the same way ordinary earth flash drives are degraded. For the past three months, Opportunity has not forcedly used the ROM, saving the accumulated data in RAM, which is reset in the absence of energy. Every day he traveled and collected scientific information, and after that it was transmitted to Earth, and the device entered the night energy conservation mode. As the manager of the Mars exploration program, John Callas, says, the experience of these three months has shown that it is possible to function successfully without permanent storage, but more flexible work is possible with flash memory: you can collect and send more data.

In October last year, the mars rover's drive was formatted. But the problems did not end there . Later, a patch was prepared for the operating system of the rover, which prevents the rover from using the problematic seventh memory bank. This month, the robot began to use an updated version of the software. The remaining six banks provide ample storage space. Since the beginning of work on Mars in January 2004, only a few cases have collected more data per day than six banks are able to keep.
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The next important event in the long life of the rover is the achievement of the distance covered, equal to the marathon distance (42.195 kilometers), for this Opportunity only 43 meters are left to go. The image above shows the rover's position as of March 23, 2015. Top - north, bottom - south. The end of the blue line shows the location at 3966 sol, and during this martian day the robot traveled 54 meters.

Now the rover is approaching the crater of the Spirit of St. Louis (Spirit of St. Louis), after studying the path will continue to the Marathon Valley. This point was chosen for the study, because spectral analysis from orbit showed that there are some clay rocks.

"Opportunity" - the second unit of the program Mars Exploration Rover. He left Earth on July 7, 2003 and arrived on Mars on January 25, 2004. The main program was designed for only 3 months, but the rover has been performing scientific tasks for almost 11 years. He set a record for covered distance . The rover is controlled by a radiation-resistant computer with a BAE RAD6000 processor, 128 MB of DRAM RAM, 3 MB of EEPROM and 256 MB of flash memory, which is divided into eight banks.
_{Render Mars Rover Opportunity, NASA . Promotion of the rover Opportunity, NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona .}