Opportunity Robot is suffering from dementia

NASA's Exploratory Opportunity Robot was on it and worked for more than 10 years - a mission that was originally intended to last only 90 days. It has spent nearly 4 thousand days on Mars, slowly moving from one goal to another, exploring craters, meteorites, strange shaped rocks, and searching for evidence. about the activities of the water in the past. Recently Opportunity is having trouble with its memory, namely "memory loss".

This happens not because of the extreme conditions in Mars, but because of Opportunity to use Flash memory.

Robot Opportunity

The memory in this robot has two types, one is "volatile" - it's like the RAM in the computer, the data written here will be erased every time the robot goes off to sleep. Opportunity's other type of memory is "non-volatile" - similar to our hard drive, it still does not go off when the computer is turned off, important data is recorded here, for example, the current location of the robot , measurement measurements etc. and so on. This "non-volatile" memory is like other storage devices, it limits the number of read and write times, when we read and write more and more times, it becomes more degraded and corrupted.

Opportunity's "non-volatile" memory is degraded and robots are often unable to access and record important data. When not recording to non-volatile memory, it writes to the volatile part, and this part When the robot goes to sleep, it will be erased, the result is that when the robot wakes up, it does not "remember" , does not know what it has done and what it will do. Opportunity often requires sleeping to charge the battery every few days, and this memory loss is recorded by NASA as "dementia".

NASA is trying to minimize the loss of this memory loss by transmitting Opportunity's key data onto the Mars Odyssey that is orbiting satellites with Mars.

The good news is that Opportunity has 7 storage drives, and it seems that only 1 in 7 is broken, they are trying to program the robot to use only 6 other drives, removing the drive from the workflow. If successful, this self-propelled robot will continue to explore Mars until it is completely damaged. Opportunity is a good robot, it completes the assigned work in just 90 days after landing on Mars, all subsequent research is beyond its original intent. The total distance it traveled on it was over 42km.