The rover has been trudging across Mars for more than a decade and is starting to fail.

NASA mission controllers are scrambling to get some extra life out of the Mars exploration rover Opportunity with a workaround that cuts off access to a failed flash memory bank that's causing the probe to suffer "amnesia" when it reboots.

Opportunity has been operating on Mars for more than a decaderemarkable, given its primary mission beginning in 2004 was only meant to last three months. The plucky little crawler set an off-Earth roving distance record earlier this year, while another NASA rover, Spirit, went kaput after just six years of exploring the surface of the Red Planet.

Spirit and Opportunity have the same basic mission-control computers and the latter rover's systems are finally starting to show some serious wear-and-tear after years in the harsh Martian elements, according to NASA.

Opportunity has seven banks of Flash memory, which it uses for long-term storage of data collected during a day's work and transferred from its volatile RAM cells. The rover goes to sleep at night and when it wakes up, it's supposed to send data stored in its Flash banks to the Mars Odyssey satellite orbiting in the skies above.

But NASA scientists discovered recently that one of the Flash memory banks has failed completely, causing Opportunity to forget its orders to transmit data to Odyssey when it comes out of a sleep cycle.

That caused periodic bouts of "amnesia," where Opportunity lost data and had to be reset by mission controllers on Earth, NASA told Discovery News.

"The problems started off fairly benign, but now they've become more seriousmuch like an illness, the symptoms were mild, but now with the progression of time things have become more serious," Mars Exploration Rover project manager John Callas, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., told the site.

"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," Callas continued. "[I]t stores telemetry data in that volatile memory, but when the rover goes to sleep and wakes up again, all [the data) is gone. So that's why we call it amnesiait forgets what it has done."

Over the holidays, the rover began exhibiting a new and potentially mission-ending error. Callas explained that Opportunity is stuck in a loop of trying to reboot itself, because it can't save any data to its Flash storage cells. For a while, it wasn't communicating with Earth at all but has since begun replying to commands sent by the JPL team.

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NASA Tries to Nurse More Life Out of Opportunity Rover