NASA's Opportunity Rover has been setting records for its time in space and distance traveled, but unfortunately it probably won't remember them. Less than a week after engineers upgraded the software to resolve its memory issues, the rover has experienced yet another bout of amnesia.
The Opportunity has already out-lived its original operation schedule and has been instrumental in many of the new discoveries made about Mars. But in late 2014, it began to experience problems with its Flash memory. On March 20, scientists uploaded new software designed to fix the issues by bypassing the a faulty bank of memory.
Unfortunately, the Opportunity experienced another memory error on March 25, according to officials from NASA.
"Although we are a little disappointed at the occurrence of an amnesia event only five days after reformatting, we are not surprised," John Callas, Opportunity project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "There is still no clear understanding of what is causing the problems. Only time will tell if we have been successful in mitigating the most serious flash problems."
The Opportunity was experiencing multiple computer resets each day before engineers began operating the rover in a mode that didn't rely on its flash memory. Since the March 20 reset, the rover appeared to be operating normally until the memory problems on March 25. The problems, however, didn't cause any loss of scientific data and since then the rover has been operating normally.
Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, touched down in 2004 three weeks apart to search for signs of water sometime in the history of Mars. Since they began their work, the rovers found plenty of such evidence and both continued to operate long after their original three month mission ended. Spirit stopped communicating with Earth in 2010 while Opportunity has continued on strong.
Last week, Opportunity set a new record of being the first spacecraft to complete a marathon on another object in space, beating out the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled 24.3 miles in 1973.
Opportunity has undoubtedly lived a full life for a rover gathering valuable data about the red planet for over 10 years. NASA has yet to decide and release details about how it plans to deal with this latest memory error experienced by Opportunity. Time isn't on its side, however, as the 2016 budget fails to include any allocation for the over 10 year old rover project. No matter what happens, Opportunity will go down in history as one of the most successful Mars rover projects ever undertaken.
