NASA to hack Mars rover Opportunity which has ‘amnesia’

NASA says the Mars rover Opportunity, which has been exploring the Red Planet for 10 years, is suffering from memory loss.

29/06/2003 WIRE: Artwork of The Mars rover, named Opportunity, (AP) PicNASA/HO illustrations space surface exploration Pic. Ap

NASA says the Mars rover Opportunity which has been exploring the Red Planet for 10 years is suffering memory loss.

The Opportunity team says the robot keeps resetting itself and they believe an age-related fault affecting the flash memory is to blame.

NASA project manager John Callas says the team thinks it has found a way to hack into Opportunity’s software and fix the glitch.

“The problems started off fairly benign, but now they’ve become more serious — much like an illness, the symptoms were mild, but now with the progression of time things have become more serious,” Mr Callas told Discovery News. “So now we’re having these events we call ‘amnesia,’ 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.

Been on Mars 10 years ... NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastwards across Endeavour Crater on Mars. Picture: Getty

“Basically the rover stops what it was doing because it wasn’t sure what caused the reset,” Mr Callas said. “So that interrupts our science mission on the surface of Mars.

“It’s like you’re trying to drive on a family trip — the car stalls out every 5 minutes. You don’t make much progress that way!”

The rover stopped communicating over Christmas.

Mr Callas said he felt the solution was probably still a couple of weeks away from implementing. He says given the robot’s age it may be coming to the end of its life anyway.

“It’s like you have an ageing parent, that is otherwise in good health — maybe they go for a little jog every day, play tennis each day — but you never know, they could have a massive stroke right in the middle of the night. So we’re always cautious that something could happen,” he said.

NASA still has the rover Curiousity on Mars following its launch in 2011.