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After 10 years of successful run, NASA’s rover to Mars named Opportunity has been speculated malfunctioning due to problem with its memory bank. Scientists at NASA are now planning to hack into the rover and solve the amnesia problem.
NASA described the problem as “persistent computer resets,” or amnesia which occurs when the rover attempts to save data in its memory flash drive storage system. Seventh memory bank out of seven memory banks has malfunctioned causing the rover to reboot and break the communication between it and NASA. The problem makes rover to bypass flash memory and attempting to store data in RAM.
Project Manager John Callas at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California said in a statement “The mission can continue without storing data to flash memory, and instead store data in volatile RAM. While we’re operating Opportunity in that mode, we are also working on an approach to make the flash memory usable again.”
As reported by rt.com, “So now we’re having these events we call ‘amnesia,’” Callas explained to Discovery News. “Which is the rover trying to use the flash memory, but it wasn’t able to, so instead it uses the RAM… it stores telemetry data in that volatile memory, but when the rover goes to sleep and wakes up again, all the data is gone. So that’s why we call it amnesia – it forgets what it has done.”
Now the time will decide that whether NASA’s attempt of hacking into rover can solve the issue or not.
