Nasa to hack Mars rover Opportunity to fix 'amnesia' fault (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

31 December 2014 Last updated at 06:44 ET

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The Opportunity team thinks an age-related fault affecting the flash memory used by the robot is to blame.

It believes it has found a way to hack the rover's software to disregard the faulty part.

Speaking to Discovery News, Nasa project manager John Callas outlined how his team intended to solve the issue.
'It forgets'

He explained how the rover, like a typical computer, has two key types of memory - volatile and non-volatile.
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In an attempt to solve the problem, the Nasa team is attempting to "hack" the rover's software so that it ignores the faulty part of its flash memory, and instead writes, permanently, to the healthy hardware.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30642548

[jakeXT]

1. I was thinking about using the RAM, but they only have 6 MB

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall11/cos109/mars.rover.pdf

[Posteritatis]

2. You can do a hell of a lot with that much memory on non-consumer computers. (nt)

[jakeXT]

3. More than the 2 kB on Apollo

The final memory specifications of the AGC were 36,864 Bytes (36KB) of ROM and 2,048 Bytes (2KB) of erasable memory.
http://space50.com/apollo/apollo-navigation-and-control-system/7947-the-computer.html