NASA’s Opportunity rover is getting a memory wipe and reboot

NASA’s Opportunity rover is still trundling across the surface of Mars, more than 11 years after its 90 day mission began. But its software is getting bogged down, so NASA’s doing a full system backup, memory wipe, and reboot. It’s just like your routine computer cleanup, just from the next planet over. Both Spirit and Opportunity carry 256MB of flash memory, used to store data that’s uploaded back to earth. After years and years of overwrites, it seems some of the flash memory cells are starting to fail, causing Opportunity to reboot itself unprompted a dozen times this month. Each reboot takes about a day to complete, stealing time away from Opportunity’s research tasks.