NASA plans to format the flash memory of the Martian spacecraft, about 200 million kilometers apart

ByIdaho National Laboratory

An unmanned spacecraft that NASA continues its research activity on Mars, which was about 200 million kilometers from EarthOpportunitiesIt is announced that it is planning to format (initialize) the flash memory of the remote control by the remote control.

Memory Reformat Planned for Opportunity Mars Rover - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-292

Opportunity is an unmanned spacecraft landed on Mars in 2004, and it is a survey vehicle of active barbari that is doing exploration activities even after more than 10 years have passed. Although the total mileage has exceeded 40 kilometers and the record of the distance traveled outside of the exploration vehicle has been rewritten, there are more than 10 troubles that require restarting the computer since August 2014 It was. Although the restoration work itself is completed in one or two days, NASA states that the scheduled exploration activity is not maintained.


Opportunity trouble is thought to be in the malfunction of the installed flash memory, and in order to solve this, NASA decided to format the opportunity flash memory by remote operation. "Since critical software such as systems are stored in sectors unaffected by formats, the risk of formatting is low," says John Cullas of NASA's Mars exploration project.

ByIan

Prior to the opportunity in the Mars exploration project, the spacecraftSpiritHas been sent to Mars, Spirit has done memory formatting work to eliminate problems of data loss troubles frequently occurred five years ago, but this time it is the first memory format for opportunities. Opportunity formatting will be performed in early September 2014.