The Problem of the Mars Rover Opportunity

The Mars rover Opportunity has a problem with its memory, leading to Digital Marketing Agency reported.

“Mars rover Opportunity, which has been exploring the Red Planet for more than 10 years, is suffering from memory problems”, according to Nasa has said.

By this way, the Nasa project manager John Callas has explained that, the rover like a typical computer, it has two key types of memory  such as volatile and non-volatile.

In this case, Non-volatile memory “remembers” its information even if it is powered down, making it ideal for long-term storage, similar to how a hard drive works on a PC.

Indeed Volatile memory is comparable to a PC's random access memory or RAM - is quicker to access but requires power, so when the machine turns off, any data stored within the volatile memory is lost.

Anyway, the rover has problem with Non-volatile memory, it means that when the rover tries to save telemetry data to the flash memory it fails, and so it then writes it to the volatile memory instead.