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posted by martyb on Saturday August 30 2014, @07:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the couldn't-they-just-call-AAA? dept.

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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  • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday August 30 2014, @10:55PM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Saturday August 30 2014, @10:55PM (#87677) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:43AM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:43AM (#87769) Journal

    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.

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @09:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @09:00AM (#87787)

      > 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

        by frojack (1554) on Sunday August 31 2014, @11:54PM (#87967) Journal

        And yet, you're HERE.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @07:54AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @07:54AM (#88028)

          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.