Reformatting a Machine 125 Million Miles Away 155
An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Opportunity rover has been rolling around the surface of Mars for over 10 years. It's still performing scientific observations, but the mission team has been dealing with a problem: the rover keeps rebooting. It's happened a dozen times this month, and the process is a bit more involved than rebooting a typical computer. It takes a day or two to get back into operation every time. To try and fix this, the Opportunity team is planning a tricky operation: reformatting the flash memory from 125 million miles away. "Preparations include downloading to Earth all useful data remaining in the flash memory and switching the rover to an operating mode that does not use flash memory. Also, the team is restructuring the rover's communication sessions to use a slower data rate, which may add resilience in case of a reset during these preparations." The team suspects some of the flash memory cells are simply wearing out. The reformat operation is scheduled for some time in September.
Re:Alternative Title (Score:5, Interesting)
Not modem reset. The filesystem on Spirit had bunch of temp files and other stuff from the Earth-Mars flight, and apparently it just ran out of inodes. So basically they had to remote into whatever constitutes a bootloader with 20 mins of latency and remove some of the no-longer-needed files.
See http://science.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
It worked on Spirit (Score:5, Interesting)
they had to do this type of thing on spirit shortly after it arrived on mars..
read more here: http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/ds... [nasa.gov]
or the PDF linked therin here http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/ds... [nasa.gov]
its got all sorts of awesome details.
We commanded a shutdown, which terminated the
current communication window, and the loss of signal occurred at the predicted time. Fifty minutes later, we commanded a beep at 7.8125 bps to alert us if the shutdown command did not work, and much to our disappointment, the beep was received!
really a fun read. ..im guessing theyll be doing a lot of similar stuff