Mars rover to get a long-distance memory wipe and reformat

[Buster's Uncle]

Mars rover to get a long-distance memory wipe and reformat
CNET CBS
By Amanda Kooser  25 minutes ago



An artist's representation of NASA's Mars rover. NASA/JPL-Caltech



NASA is about to do a task that many a sysadmin has tried before -- it just happens to be doing it from a distance of well over 100 million miles. The Mars Opportunity rover, Curiosity's older sibling, has been having some memory problems lately, requiring increasingly frequent resets that have slowed the rover down while doing all its cool scientific tasks (like examining clay minerals and seeing its shadow).

The space agency has had enough of these resets after performing over a dozen in August alone. "Worn-out cells in the flash memory are the leading suspect in causing these resets," says John Callas, project manager for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project. While it sounds like a wipe is pretty serious memory surgery, the rover has stored critical software and sequences in other spots that won't be touched by the reformat.

Opportunity's flash memory behaves like other types of flash-memory devices we're all familiar with down here on Earth, including digital cameras and audio players.

NASA will first download anything useful from the flash memory and store it here on our planet. Then the rover will be placed in an operating mode that doesn't use the flash memory. The reformatting process will clear the memory and flag the bad cells to keep them out of use. Opportunity should be feeling quite a bit sharper once it's done.

The reformat is set to take place in early September. Perhaps what's most fascinating about all this is how NASA can be located 125 million miles away from the adventurous rover and still perform a memory reformat. Most people find it hard just to back up the data on their personal computers, but NASA is handling it from a distance that is almost unimaginable.

The operation should get Opportunity back on track so it can continue setting records, like driving further than any other off-Earth vehicle in history. Go, Opportunity, go.


http://news.yahoo.com/mars-rover-long-distance-memory-141648076.html

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA to reformat Mars rover's memory from 125 million miles away
The Verge
By Jacob Kastrenakes on September 1, 2014 12:57 pm Email @jake_k






NASA's long-running Mars rover Opportunity is going to have its memory reformatted in an attempt to resolve a series of recurring errors that have been interrupting its work for a day or two at a time with some frequency over the last month. The rover, which is now over 10 years old and well beyond its original mission lifetime, reset itself over a dozen times last month because of what NASA says is likely an issue with worn-out flash memory that it's attempting to store data in. Pieces of flash memory can wear out after repeated use, and it's possible that the rover is still attempting to use these worn-out parts of its memory.


"The flash reformatting is a low-risk process."


"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," John Callas, project manager for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project, says in a statement. By reformatting the memory, NASA says that it'll be able to identify and disable use of the bad flash memory cells, hopefully avoiding frequent resets like these for the foreseeable future. All "useful" data remaining on Opportunity will be downloaded before it's reformatted, and the rover will communicate with NASA at a slower data rate during the formatting process in order to improve reliability of the transmission.

This will be the first memory reformat for Opportunity, which is currently about 125 million miles from NASA's California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This won't be the first Mars rover to undergo a reformat though: NASA's Spirit rover, which landed on Mars just before Opportunity but is no longer operational, underwent a memory reformat back in 2009, five years after landing. Opportunity's reformatting is planned for next month. The rover was last reported to be traveling toward Mars' Marathon Valley, which is believed to be rich in clay minerals.


http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/1/6093243/nasa-opportunity-rover-memory-reformat-planned-after-errors