Currently, NASA has two working rovers on the surface of Mars, Opportunity and Curiosity, but one of which is having minor technical difficulties. New reports are claiming that the Opportunity rover, is now suffering from "amnesia," as it's frequently rebooting itself and losing collected data.

Of course, the other rover Curiosity has not been affected so far - it is a relatively new one having been sent up in 2011. In the opinion of scientists, the Opportunity is having an age-related fault that is affecting the flash memory which is used by the robot. The good news is that they have found a possible way to overcome this problem, they plan to hack into the software of the rover and reprogram it to bypass and disregard the faulty part.

NASA project manager John Callas went ahead and recently explained the problem. The fault of the non-volatile memory of Opportunity is related to the hardware's age or old-age problem. When it attempts to save telemetry data to the flash memory it is not able to do so. Hence, it writes it to the volatile memory and, when the rover powers down, the information is lost.

The problems are becoming more acute because due to this issue, the rover resets itself, at times, and stops communicating with mission control. Therefore, a solution is to "hack" the rover's software so that it ignores the faulty part of its flash memory, and instead writes, permanently, to the healthy hardware.

This hacking operation could take a couple of weeks, and John Callas has cautioned that Opportunity is ageing and could be nearing the end of its useful life.