Researchers at NASA are looking for ways to improve the memory of the Mars exploration rover Opportunity after a number of recent glitches led to what company officials have called "amnesia" with its memory banks.

The 10-year-old rover relies on orbital passes from Mars Odyssey satellite in order to send commands and communications to and from NASA. When a pass doesn't take place between the rover's power cycles however the rover doesn't transfer information from its temporary RAM to its permanent flash memory.

The rover's repeated failed attempts to save data to the flash memory causes it to reboot, thus erasing its last set of commands received, according to NASA.

"Volatile memory is like the traditional RAM you have in your computer; non-volatile memory uses flash memory technology," Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said to Discovery News.

"So now we're having these events we call 'amnesia,' which is the rover trying to use the flash memory, but it wasn't able to, so instead it uses the RAM it stores telemetry data in that volatile memory, but when the rover goes to sleep and wakes up again, all (the data) is gone," he added. "So that's why we call it amnesia -- it forgets what it has done."

NASA's Mars rover has been working without flash memory since earlier this month.

Callas said that while Opportunity has been working in that mode, NASA has been able to work on an approach to make the flash memory usable once again.

"We will be sure to give this approach exhaustive reviews before implementing those changes on the rover," he said.  

Opportunity has been on the surface of Mars since January 2004. Since then it has traveled the distance of over 25 miles on the planet, a record for any rover.

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