Opportunity rover
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How NASA plans to deal with Opportunity rover's failing flash memory
Just like your favorite USB flash drive, the memory on NASA's Opportunity rover is beginning to degrade after more than a decade on Mars. That's led to bouts of "amnesia" where the rover ends up losing data and constantly resets, both of which make any sort of serious scientific work difficult. NASA's already tried reformatting Opportunity to deal with the problem (just like the Spirit rover five years ago), but after a slight communications blackout over Christmas, the agency is now preparing a software update that will prevent the rover from using a specific memory bank entirely. That'll hopefully put a stop to Opportunity's forgetfulness, since it will only be storing data on properly functioning memory, reports Discovery News.
