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10 Years In, Mars Rover Opportunity Suffers From Flash Memory Degradation
astroengine writes Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been exploring the Martian surface for over a decade — that's an amazing ten years longer than the 3-month primary mission it began in January 2004. But with its great successes, inevitable age-related issues have surfaced and mission engineers are being challenged by an increasingly troubling bout of "amnesia" triggered by the rover's flash memory. "The problems started off fairly benign, but now they've become more serious — much like an illness, the symptoms were mild, but now with the progression of time things have become more serious," Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.
Explain how the results of research done two years ago could have been built into a probe launched ten years ago using technology from twenty years ago?
The expected mission life of the rover was 90 days. It is currently on day 3885.
They expected to run out of power several years ago. Thus, they did not design other parts of the system to last as long as it has. Given the designed lifetime, it would have been absurd to add the extra weight of a heating system, if such a thing could even be powered at all.
For a car analogy, that would be like reinforcing your transmission because after 10,000,000 miles it starts to get a bit off-balance.
Technically they did, if it was a 3 month mission, and here we are 10 years later saying "hey it's starting to have issues"... i think they already over-engineered it quite a bit.
Or in human terms, it would be like having a life expectancy of 75 years and developing Alzheimer's at the ripe old age of 3,237.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This was known, and should have been exploited:
The rover is equipped with heaters. There is some possibility that simply placing the flash closer could have extended the life of the memory.
The rover's primary planned mission was 3 months and the extended mission plan was two years. It lasted 10 years and your upset they didn't design a way to bake the flash (offline) for four hours at 250C? Self heating flash did not exist, should they heat all the electronics? Invent a mechanism to remove the flash and put it in a little oven? Are you shutting down the rover's computer for this? How much complexity would that have added? How long would it take to develop?
There is such a thing as "good enough," and engineers that don't know that never ship usable product.
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