Opportunity on continuing problems with flash memory

Opportunity rover continues to plow the surface of the Red Planet, regularly sending this information to the NASA. Hard to believe, but after a month goes 12th year of continuous operation!

After such a period of operation were bound to be a technical problem. And so it was, with the most vulnerable part of the rover was the flash memory. In October this year, flash memory Opportunity even had to reformat .

After formatting the situation has not improved. Board computer reboots repeatedly, and engineers moved the rover in operation without the use of flash memory. In this mode, the robot can operate in part, to collect scientific data and move around, although not able to store information during the night.

The good news is that the engineers intend to still recover flash memory.

"Soon after the holidays we will try Workaround to block offending the memory bank" - said Guy Webster (Guy Webster) of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in интервью Astrowatch.net.

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

Until the final repair all the collected information is placed in the memory - and possibly sent back to Earth before retiring to sleep mode.

"And the Spirit, and Opportunity began to experience problems with the flash memory after a few years on Mars - said Webster. - When they worked ten times longer than they are due. " At the end of January 2015 Opportunity exceeds expected life 44 times.

Now the rover continues the way to the valley of Marathon Mars, where Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter noticed the large number of clay minerals.

Of scientific instruments has failed thermal emission spectrometer (dust on the mirror makes it difficult to analyze data). Mossbauer spectrometer after repeated measurement of the half-life of the particles now calculates the readings for weeks, so that has become unsuitable for practical use. Source of radioisotopes for the spectrometer alpha particles too much exhausted, so that the measurements take longer. But they still can be used, and other instruments, too, in order, said Guy Webster.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/243509/