Opportunity's Memory Reset: Curing a Mars Rover of Amnesia

NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity is due for a flash memory reformat in an effort to resolve an increasingly bad case of robot amnesia.

The Mars rover has been experiencing an increasing number of unexpected computer resets, with a dozen this month alone, heavily interfering with the rover's ongoing extended mission. Each reset recovery reportedly takes more than 24 hours to resolve, and can be a significant set-back for time-sensitive scientific activity.

"Worn-out cells in the flash memory are the leading suspect in causing these resets," John Callas, project manager for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project, said in a recent statement. "The flash reformatting is a low-risk process, as critical sequences and flight software are stored elsewhere in other non-volatile memory on the rover."

"Low risk" or not, reformatting a complex computer's memory from 125 million miles away sounds a lot harder than your standard over-night laptop maintenance.

Still, NASA's experts are no strangers to these kinds of remote resets. Back in 2009, Opportunity's sister-rover, Spirit, was suffering from a similar case of robo-amnesia and had its 256 MB flash memory successfully reformatted. It is expected that the same will go for Opportunity, which is still chugging along as the farthest traveled extra-terrestrial vehicle this solar system has ever seen.

The reformat is due to take place sometime in early September, with Mars Exploration Rover Project team members preparing to download any and all crucial Opportunity data in the flash memory. They will then swap Opportunity's current operating mode for one that doesn't use flash memory.

To prevent this from happening again, the team is also switching the rover over to a slower rate of data exchange. The team suspects that the incredibly fast rate of data exchange the rover has been "hearing" might have been too much for its aging mind to handle, so they'll slow things down a bit for the 11-year-old Mars rover.