Cav's Place

After landing on Mars at 5:05 AM UTC on January 25, 2004, the little rover that could, Opportunity, has now started its 13th year on the red planet. In addition, with the January 2 winter solstice now behind it, conditions should improve and more power should once again be available for operations, thanks to both the increasing amount of sunlight and the somewhat reduced need for heating. And this is coming after managing to keep busy all through the middle of winter, thanks to the way it was positioned and the dust cleaning events that took place.
Of course, problems do accumulate, by far the most notable having to do with the flash memory, which in spite of all the team’s attempts remains unusable. There were some more tests done even recently, but nothing seems to work and the hope that the worst problems were limited to bank seven and isolating it would allow the rover to continue using the remaining space in relatively good conditions most of the time seems to have been proven false. Still, while it obviously limits what can be done, operating in RAM-only mode doesn’t seem to generate any problems in itself at this time and it allows Opportunity to continue analyzing its surroundings and add even more to the large amount of useful and intriguing information it has already delivered.

Since this post was mainly meant to mark the moment, I guess I’ll end it here, but not before apologizing for it being over a day late. I guess it’s better late than never, though, and I definitely hope this 13th year will prove a lucky one and the little rover will take advantage of the improving conditions to continue operating at least without any additional problems, if fixing the existing ones, or at least mitigating them to a great extent, will continue to prove impossible.