NASA's Opportunity rover currently exploring the surface of Mars is apparently suffering from memory loss.

The U.S. space agency launched the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity mission in July 2003 that landed on Mars in January 2004. The original mission was to transmit data from the Martian surface for only three months. Opportunity, however, has been sending pivotal information about the Martian terrain and atmosphere for 10 years now.

Like Us on Facebook

The rover is already been manifesting signs of wear and tear and is suffering from constant memory disruptions and memory loss.

There are two types of memory inside the rover: volatile RAM and flash memory. Volatile RAM doesn't store data for a long time but sends its information to the flash memory and then to the Mars Odyssey satellite. Currently, the flash memory has become faulty.

During sleep mode, the volatile RAM can't store data to conserve power. The NASA team discovered the flash memory is apparently not sending data to the Odyssey satellite when Opportunity wakes up from its sleep mode.

Apart from this, NASA also says the flash memory has its limits when it comes to how many times data can be written and re-written on it. The rover reboots when it tries to save data on the flash memory. When a series of commands are sent to the rover, it will keep on rebooting and eventually forgets previous commands.

According to John Callas, who is the Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the root of the problem is apparently coming from one data bank. The seventh data bank is causing this data loss and creating communication glitches. 

NASA sought to solve this problem by completely ignoring the seventh data bank while using the other functioning banks instead. It will take around two weeks to repair the problem.

Callas said that even if there are memory issues plaguing Opportunity, the mission will still continue as NASA engineers will now use RAM to store data for the time being.

When the problem is fixed, data in the RAM will be sent as a transmission to the Odyssey satellite using the flash memory.

TagsNASA Mars Rover is Apparently Suffering from Memory Loss, Mars, NASA, Opportunity Rover, NASA opportunity rover mars memory loss amnesia, mars exploration