Opportunity Continues Flash Problems

The rover Opportunity continues to plow the surface of the Red Planet, regularly sending the collected information to NASA. It is hard to believe, but in a month the 12th year of its continuous work will go!

After such a period of operation, technical problems should inevitably arise. So it happened, with the flash memory being the most vulnerable element of the rover. In October of this year, Opportunity flash memory even had to be formatted .
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After formatting, the situation has not improved. The on-board computer repeatedly rebooted, and the engineers switched the rover into operation mode without using flash memory. In this mode, the robot can partially function, collect scientific data and move, although it is not able to store information during a night's sleep.

The good news is that engineers intend to restore flash memory after all.

“Shortly after the New Year holidays, we will try a workaround to block a failed memory bank,” said Guy Webster of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an interview with Astrowatch.net.

As it turned out, failures are observed only in one of seven banks of flash memory. Rover operators are now preparing a set of commands to disable this particular chip.

Before the final repair, all the collected information is placed in the operational memory - and, if possible, it is sent to Earth before going to sleep.

“Both Spirit and Opportunity began to experience problems with flash memory after a few years of working on Mars,” Webster noted. - when they worked ten times longer than the deadline. ” At the end of January 2015, Opportunity will exceed the planned period of work by 44 times.

Now the rover continues on its way to the Marathon Valley of Mars, where Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has noticed the presence of a large amount of clay minerals.

The thermal emission spectrometer has already failed from scientific instruments (dust on the mirror makes it difficult to analyze the data). The Mössbauer spectrometer after repeated measurement of the half-life of particles now calculates readings for weeks, so that it has become unsuitable for practical operation. The source of radioisotopes for the alpha particle spectrometer is also significantly depleted, so measurements take longer. But they can still be used, and the rest of the tools are also in order, said Guy Webster.