Mars Rover Has 'Amnesia' With Worn Out NAND Memory
Source: Discovery News
Mars Rover Has 'Amnesia' With Worn Out NAND Memory
By Niels Broekhuijsen DECEMBER 30, 2014 2:35 PM - Source: Discovery News
It seems that one of the Mars Rover Opportunity's NAND memory banks has been worn out, giving the rover Amnesia.
Today we have some strange news for you: someone's SSD broke. Don't worry, we're not writing about your neighbor who managed to snap one in half, but rather about NASA's SSD. More specifically, the memory of the Mars Rover Opportunity.
When the Opportunity was deployed, what it had inside wasn't called an SSD – just "non-volatile flash memory" (which is exactly what an SSD is anyway). Now, after a decade of service, the researchers controlling the rover have pinpointed the source of its strange behavior. Namely, some of the NAND memory has gone bust after all these write cycles.
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The effect has been that the Mars Rover keeps trying to write data to the bank, but because of the way it's programmed, when it fails to write to it a certain number of times, it reboots. As a result, all the data that the rover had gathered into its RAM memory until that time hasn't been saved, making it a rather large pain to collect data effectively. The NASA staff calls this "amnesia," because the Rover keeps forgetting everything it has just done.
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Read more: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nasa-mars-rover-amnesia,28285.html
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