Ten years after deployment, flash memory needs to be reformatted due to increasing error rates.
At least that's what NASA is finding on the Opportunity Rover, running since 2004 on the surface of Mars. NASA is planning another long distance maintenance operation that will require reformatting the flash storage. They are old hands at this having done the same on the Spirit rover 5 years ago.
Opportunity has "reset" itself a dozen times this month, each time taking a day or two to fully recover. This is forcing the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to plan to reformat the flash memory which is used to store images and data pending transmission to Earth:
"Worn-out cells in the flash memory are the leading suspect in causing these resets," said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, project manager for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project. "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."
Similar to the flash storage in your cell phone, the Rover's flash is simultaneously more primitive, and more rugged; designed and shielded to survive the radiation of space flight.
The project landed twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity on Mars in early 2004 to begin missions planned to last only three months. Spirit worked for six years, and Opportunity is still active.
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The future of some of NASA's current missions is under review:
NASA is on the verge of releasing its long-awaited prioritization of planetary missions, meant to guide the agency if tight budgets force it to switch off an operating spacecraft. But two missions that had been considered on the verge of closure — the Mars Opportunity rover and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) — have each received a reprieve of another two years of operations, scientists close to the projects have confirmed.
Although NASA officials had insisted otherwise, Opportunity and LRO were considered particularly vulnerable because funding for them was included in a supplement to the White House’s annual budget request to Congress, rather than as part of the main planetary sciences division budget.
In a decade of operation, Opportunity has rolled more than 40.6 kilometres across Mars, exploring areas including the most ancient habitable environment known on the planet. The rover is suffering from several mechanical issues as well as problems with its flash memory that have triggered computer resets in recent weeks. Opportunity, which costs on the order of US$13 million annually, is heading for a region called Marathon Valley where scientists think clay minerals formed in a watery environment.
The LRO finished its main task in 2010: mapping possible locations for astronauts to return to the Moon. More recently it has focused on studying change on the lunar surface, such as from fresh meteorite impacts.
The complete ‘senior review’, encompassing five other planetary missions, will be released at a planetary sciences advisory group meeting in Washington DC on 3 September.
The achievements of these 2 missions far exceed what was originally expected of them. Which missions do you think have provided the most value for money, or have impressed you with their ability to keep on going long past their expected expiry date?
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Saturday August 30 2014, @07:26PM
RIP Spirit. [xkcd.com] Opportunity, keep on trucking! You're doing a great job, and we'll send someone to keep you company as soon as we can.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Saturday August 30 2014, @10:47PM
As a nerd, I have a distaste for opportunism (hunting for opportunity) as opposed to long term thinking/solutions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @11:38PM
Fortunately NASA knows exactly where Opportunity is, so we don't need to hunt for it. :)
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday August 31 2014, @12:33AM
Damn, I *still* feel really bad for that rover whenever I read that comic. I can't help it.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday August 31 2014, @03:46AM
Imagine a future where we don't have to anthropomorphize machines because we will have "baked" personality and human qualities into them. Exciting? Frightening? not sure
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday August 31 2014, @08:27AM
I vote for frightening.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 31 2014, @09:20AM
I vote for ghastly. [technovelgy.com]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday August 30 2014, @10:55PM
As it reads as "There is an opportunity to reformat flash storage" so having rover in the title would probably clear things up.
As for the actual rover? it just shows when you get the pork barrel BS out of the way NASA can build amazing tech, look at their track record with the probes, amazing stuff. Sadly Senator Porkus and Congressman Bacon won't sign up for anything they can't get their snouts into which is how you get Constellation, where they would take the worst parts of the shuttle and rejigger them into a lego pile of suck. the bitch is it would probably be really cheap just to man rate the Atlas 5 and those have been pretty damned solid, and use that as the basis for our own Soyuz style program where you build upon what works instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater like we did with Saturn.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:43AM
As it reads as "There is an opportunity to reformat flash storage"
Yup, and it took me a while to come up with just the right amount ambiguity to hook the reader.
Glad it caught your eye.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @09:00AM
> Yup, and it took me a while to come up with just the right amount ambiguity to hook the reader.
> Glad it caught your eye.
It seems to have worked on him. It had the opposite effect on me. I parsed it as non-sensical and ignored it. I've got lots of content to choose from and if I have to work to understand the headline, I'll just move on to the next choice. That's not a conscious spiteful decision, just the natural flow of web browsing.
The only reason I am here is because slashdot ran the same story with a clear headline which made me think I must have misread this headline. But I didn't, so I came in to the comments to see if anyone else thought the same. I guess everybody has their criteria for what makes a good headline, but I'd like to think that clarity is universally important. With all the things competing for people's attention, clarity encourages focus, vagueness discourages it.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday August 31 2014, @11:54PM
And yet, you're HERE.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @07:54AM
Yes, as I said, only because slashdot did it right. I still haven't read the summary here nor have I made a meaningful contribution to the discussion of the story.
I guess you could count that as a victory for vagueness, but only a pyrrhic victory.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday August 31 2014, @01:01AM
So what does this do, mark bad blocks so they won't be used like on a floppy disk?
I wonder what kind of error detection it has and what these resets are all about. Wouldn't data corruption in the flash be detected and lead to a retry or discarding the data?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @09:17AM
My guess is that the reset is a hard fault triggered when a detected but unrecoverable error occurs during a read (or more likely a write because flash memory almost always fails on write, the write just doesn't "take" but you can still read the data that was last successfully written).
It is really common for an OS to deliberately crash (e.g. kernel panic) when it detects an unrecoverable error. The principle is that unrecoverable errors put the system into an undefined state, so better to do a full reset than to try to continue operating when you know there is a problem that could result in further data corruption.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday August 31 2014, @08:32AM
Is just another reason strengthening my case against SSDs. I want capacity more than speed honestly. I imagine SSDs will surpass HDDs at some point in capacity, but I imagine also that I'll be told to suck it up when they fail prematurely from too many writes caused by the constant massive compile jobs I will be running.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @09:10AM
> Is just another reason strengthening my case against SSDs.
So your case is based on technology that is well over a decade old? The unit has exceeded its expected 3-month service life by 40x and it is still mostly working. Seems to me that it is one hell of a strong case for SSDs.
But people see what they want to see. So good luck with that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 31 2014, @09:29AM
I think the perfect system has both SSD and HDD. SDD for the software. That changes relatively seldom, is generally not that large, and fast loading makes a big impact. HDD for the data. That can be large, changes often, and most of the time loading speed is not critical. You can also backup the small SDD to the large HDD so restore is easier if you need to replace the SSD (it will, of course, then also automatically be covered by your backup strategy for that HDD).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.