--- title: NASA Will Try To Hack Mars Rover Opportunity To Fix ‘Amnesia’ | TIME description: NASA believes one of the Mars Opportunity rover’s memory banks is continually sending data and important measurements to volatile memory, which means the data gets wiped every time it powers down. canonical: https://time.com/video/9MXSdoch/ og:title: NASA Will Try To Hack Mars Rover Opportunity To Fix ‘Amnesia’ og:description: NASA believes one of the Mars Opportunity rover’s memory banks is continually sending data and important measurements to volatile memory, which means the data gets wiped every time it powers down. og:url: https://time.com/video/9MXSdoch/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/9MXSdoch/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: NASA Will Try To Hack Mars Rover Opportunity To Fix ‘Amnesia’ twitter:description: NASA believes one of the Mars Opportunity rover’s memory banks is continually sending data and important measurements to volatile memory, which means the data gets wiped every time it powers down. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/9MXSdoch/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # NASA Will Try To Hack Mars Rover Opportunity To Fix ‘Amnesia’ > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: NASA Will Try To Hack Mars Rover Opportunity To Fix ‘Amnesia’ [Watch (HLS stream): NASA Will Try To Hack Mars Rover Opportunity To Fix ‘Amnesia’](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/9MXSdoch.m3u8) (1:40)  _Published 2014-12-31. NASA believes one of the Mars Opportunity rover’s memory banks is continually sending data and important measurements to volatile memory, which means the data gets wiped every time it powers down._ --- Jul 27, 2023 5:42 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [A Eulogy for NASA's Opportunity Rover ](/video/06y9Ksrk/) ### A Eulogy for NASA's Opportunity Rover [NASA Employees Speak About the Mars Opportunity Rover](/video/qr4pXw1H/) ### NASA Employees Speak About the Mars Opportunity Rover [Mars Rover Opportunity Celebrates Its Eighth Birthday](/video/RrhAibb0/) ### Mars Rover Opportunity Celebrates Its Eighth Birthday --- ## Transcript it's provided us with some of the most stunning ground views of a foreign planet ever take and that's to say nothing of the discoveries, NASA scientists say, the Mars rover opportunity has made over the past ten plus year. But the rover that just wont stop now appears to have amnesia. Just as NASA says it's on the verge of some of its most exciting finds. Nearly three weeks ago NASA announced Opportunity was having trouble with its memory. Something was wrong with one of its seven banks of non- volatile memory, the more permanent storage where Opportunity keeps the measurements the rover's collecting. Instead, Opportunity was trying to send some of that data into its volatile. It's volatile memory, which acts more like a computer's ram storage and gets wiped every time the rover powers down. NASA's rover project manager told Discovery, basically the rover stops what it was doing because it wasn't sure what caused the reset. It's like you're trying to drive on a family trip. The car stalls out every five minutes. You don't make much progress that way. So scientists had to figure out a fix for what they've dubbed amnesia. They believe they've developed software that should be ready to upload in a couple of weeks that will bypass the one glitchey memory bank effectively hacking the Rover to fix it. As we mentioned, getting the Rover back up and fully healthy couldn't come at a much better time. Less than half a mile from Opportunity's current location at Endeavor Crater, scientists desperately want to make it to an area they've named Marathon Valley. The area has clay deposits that could have been formed by PH- neutral water on the terrain's surface. Read, an ancient, habitable environment. Let's keep in mind that when they land on Mars in. For Rover's spirit. An opportunity where each only supposed to work and collect data for three months. Spirit made it six years. 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