NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity is over 10 years old and has already surpassed its original estimated lifetime, but its flash memory seems to be messed up because the rover has been resetting itself way more than it should be.
In order to fix the issue, NASA is going to attempt to reformat the memory of the Mars rover from over 125 million miles away on Earth.
John Callas, project manager for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project, said in a 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.”
Essentially, all things point to the rover simply having some bad flash memory cells and all important data will be downloaded by NASA before performing the reset process.
The last Mars rover to undergo this type of reset was the NASA’s Spirit rover in 2009, five years after landing on the red planet.
