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NASA Update Will Deal With Opportunity Flash Memory "Amnesia"
BarbaraHudson writes Computerworld has some details on NASA's latest fix to allow the Opportunity Mars Rover to store data while in overnight "sleep mode." Opportunity has been suffering from a glitch that's causing what NASA scientists describe as memory and data loss — or robotic "amnesia" — caused by flash memory deterioration since early December. Currently any information gathered is stored temporarily in RAM and must be sent to Earth so it's not lost when Opportunity powers down.
While that may or may not be true, it's kind of random.
These things were intended to last 90 days or so. It's been 11 years.
At this point, if they're still able to apply updates to make fixes to the damned thing it means this has outlived its originally planned lifespan by a massive amount of time.
I hardly think that's a fair critique of SSD in general. I'd say pretty much every part of that rover has performed well beyond anything it was ever expected to.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I run SSD's on all my computers and never had one fail yet and when one does, it takes less than 10 min to get a new one up and running. (Already tested my restore plan with my backups) In the meantime I enjoy the awesome performance and get back my 10 min and money in x1000 from the time it saves lol.
Most of the ones that fail are the cheap clearance, no name ones, the good Samsung and Intel ones are developing a great track record.
But on topic, the rovers are all custom and it's been 10+ years, i believe they already know about this flaw now and they have found ways around it with newer flash memory.
Keeping old relics and forgotten dreams alive is what they do best.
And here I thought it was being able to successfully launch people in billion dollar vehicles built by lowest bidders, loaded with millions of pounds of high explosives without killing anybody (usually)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Actually, the amount of NAND in Opportunity is 256MB, which isn't a lot. RAM is only 128MB; NAND is routinely given a full wipe and rewrite. Given it was only meant to last for 90 days, it's probably a low-grade MLC with under 5000 erase cycles reliability.
I very much doubt that. If you're going to spend that amount of money on sending it to Mars, you don't skimp on off-the-shelf technology that costs a few hundred bucks. You may have to ditch developing that custom system that'd increase the mission budget with a million dollars, but that's different. And if you want to make it as radiation-hardened as possible I doubt they'd go with anything but SLC for maximum signal strength. I doubt it has anything to do with write cycles which they presumably have full control over at all, it's probably from operating in the harsh environment for 11 years. No wonder it's getting a bit flaky.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Voyager's magnetic tape drives would like to have a word with you