If you think fixing computer problems on your PC is a pain, trying fixing them from 125 million miles away. That’s exactly what NASA’s JPL Mars Exploration Rover (MER) team will be doing soon.
The Opportunity rover, which has been exploring Mars for ten years now, has been randomly rebooting for several months. Because the rover always came back, the team tried ignoring the problem, but just like you with a misbehaving computer, the day finally came when they couldn’t put up up with it anymore.
The scientists believe that the rebooting is happening because of trouble with the Opportunity rover’s 256MBs of flash storage. “Worn-out cells in the flash memory are the leading suspect in causing these resets,” said John Callas, the project manager for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project in a statement.