The Opportunity rover she begins to forget after ten years of exploring it surfaces of Mars. Opportunity's memory appears to have worn down with use, meaning the rover may forget data that it has stored when it is turned off.
Opportunity began exploring the planet in 2004, and uses two types of memory. Scientists call them volatile and non-volatile. Non-volatile memory is something like a computer's hard drive and is used to store information that the rover will need to keep when the rover is shut down. mode of.
However, the rover is constantly losing data when it re-starts unexpectedly. The Mars Rover Opportunity Manager, NASA's John Callas, compares the problem with a disease.
"The problems started quite mildly, but now they have become much more serious - it is very much like a disease, the symptoms were mild, but now with the progress of time things have become more serious," Callas told the Discovery News.
The problem grew, and by Christmas, Rover had ceased to communicate with the Earth. He failed to execute instructions given to him, although he had contact with his auditors.
NASA scientists think they can tackle the problem. It seems that one of the seven banks of memory built into the rover is causing the problems, and they hope that if they isolate the problematic one the rover will continue to function normally with the other six.
But to do this, scientists will need to write a new software and then load it and install it in Opportunity. This is expected to happen in the next two weeks.
