NASA plans to fix Mars Rover Opportunity's Amnesia via Hacking

NASA's Opportunity (Click Image to download)

It’s been more than 10 years since NASA’s rover Opportunity landed on the red planet. The rover has been exploring Mars ever since and has provided a lot of information for the understanding of the red planet. NASA has also stated that the rover Opportunity has lasted on Mars more than they ever anticipated it to. But the recent memory problems suggest that the rover may be coming to an end of its life. But still NASA plans to sort out the issue through hacking into the software of the rover.

NASA has explained that the rover like a typical computer has two memory parts, one volatile like the RAM of our computer which totally gets wiped out when we shutdown or reboot our computer, and the other non-volatile which acts like the secondary storage such as the hard disk on our computer. The non-volatile memory preserves data even after rebooting or shutting down.

The rover Opportunity has a problem in its volatile memory which may be related to the ageing hardware on the rover.

The data cannot be saved by the rover in its volatile memory because an error occurs so the rover then has to save the data in its non-volatile memory.

The problem then arises as the non-volatile memory even though large but still has a finite limit to it, meaning the rover can’t operate for long in this condition.

Even though the rover can operate normally at present, but NASA plans to fix the issue by hacking into the software of the rover and disregard the bad patch of the volatile memory that causes this issue.

NASA does understand that there’s a chance that the process may cause permanent damage to the rover but since it has outperformed its anticipated life, NASA plans to move ahead with the solution nonetheless.

Source : full-timewhistle.com