NASA’s long-lived Mars rover Opportunity was left reeling by another flash memory failure that caused it to suffer a case of “amnesia”, although it didn’t lose any scientific data.

The weary and battered Martian explorer’s flash memory has suffered from a string of problems over the years. The rover packs 256 MB of flash memory that houses mission data gathered by its 20 MHz RAD6000 RISC processor, before uploading said data to a satellite that delivers it back to Terra.

NASA previously shut down and reformatted Opportunity’s flash memory in August 2014 in order to try and stop frequent system resets that were severely hampering its ability to study the red planet. John Callas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab said at the time he believed the problem was caused by worn out cells in the Flash memory, and that his team would be able to mark the bad cells by reformatting it. In addition, reformatting the flash allowed the team to trace earlier problems to flash memory Bank 7, which has since been “roped off”.

That operation apparently cured Opportunity’s flash memory from the daily resets it was suffering, but it seems that the “amnesia” still remains. Opportunity relies on its volatile flash memory to shoot its daily data transmission back to earth before shutting down each night to preserve its limit power supply.

“Although we are a little disappointed at the occurrence of an amnesia event only five days after reformatting, we are not surprised,” wrote Callas in the Mars NASA blog. “There is still no clear understanding of what is causing the problems. Only time will tell if we have been successful in mitigating the most serious flash problems”.

Callas adds that despite the nusiance caused by Opportunity’s flash failures, it’s still able to carry out its regular duties, such as cruising the planet and using its robotic arm to study interesting rocks it stumbles across.

While Opportunity may not be the best endorsement for Flash’s long-term reliability, one should consider that the Mars rover was never designed to be around for this long anyway. It’s long since surpassed its original 90-day design life, having begun travesing the red planet way back in 2003.

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