As of last week...

Opportunity started exhibiting memory symptoms this month similar to events seen with Spirit in 2009. This is not a health and safety concern, but can cause loss of some data intended for downlink. It can be avoided for more important data by downlinking before any rover nap. The suspect cause is corruption in the flash file system used by the rover for non-volatile telemetry storage. The project implemented a detection diagnostic on Sol 3189 (Jan. 12, 2013) to flag the occurrence of these events in separate non-volatile memory. No events have occurred since Sol 3183 (Jan. 6, 2013), and the rover remains in good health.

As of Sol 3193 (Jan. 16, 2013), the solar array energy production was 498 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 1.08 and a solar array dust factor of 0.623.

Total odometry is 22.03 miles (35455.34 meters).

So it is starting to wear out. Arthritic joint in its arm, bad wheel bearing, and now signs of memory corruption.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

• NASA's Opportunity rover notches another milestone on Mars - Authored by: JamesK on Monday, January 21 2013 @ 12:33 PM EST
  • NASA's Opportunity rover notches another milestone on Mars - Authored by: charlie Turner on Tuesday, January 22 2013 @ 09:48 PM EST