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.

Comments

depends on why bank 7 has problems

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/status_opportunityAll.html

I don't know that one could expect similar behavior from the other banks on a similar schedule. This is fairly old technology in terms of design and software, so I don't think they're doing any sort of automatic wear leveling, for instance. It's probably "manually leveled" if at all. For all we know, bank 7 was used the most and it's worn out. Or, it's taking more total ionizing dose (TID) because of the physical location on the card. Or, it's just a process variation when making the flash chips themselves. They were probably fabricated in 2000, most likely at Micron, since for a 2003 launch, the computer was probably assembled by early 2002, if not earlier.
Or, the software is not optimized for "space flight use" but, rather, for "consumer camera memory card", which has a different read/write/erase pattern and error tolerance.

http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/25MC.pdf describes an improved file manager under development, but also describes the existing flash architecture.

Why are we still fighting with this?

[emil]

If it was long-known that long-duration, low-intensity heat would revive failed flash, why did these rovers leave without the ability to do so?

And why am I not able now to buy flash memory that will heat itself to 800 degrees and heal itself?

And why isn't flash memory sold in ceramic housings that can stand me baking them in an oven for a few days to fix failed flash manually?

I'd like to buy hardware that works, or that can be repaired. That's not flash.

Back to plated wire memory and tape sytems?

[mschaffer]

So, does that mean that NASA needs to go back to the plated wire memory and tape systems like the Honeywell systems that ran the Viking and Voyager systems for decades on Mars and in space?