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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Spirit _ How much onboard memory do the rovers have?

Posted by: briv1016 Oct 12 2008, 12:24 AM

With the Bonestell Pan being kept on the rover and transmitted later to maximize power, I'm a little confused about how much flash memory the rover(s) have. The rover site says, "Onboard memory includes 128 megabytes of random access memory, augmented by 256 megabytes of flash memory and smaller amounts of other non-volatile memory, which allows the system to retain data even without power."

But, according to the tracking site Spirit already has 1100Mb filled and that number is only going to go up as the panorama is completed. How much memory is really onboard?

Posted by: siravan Oct 12 2008, 02:49 AM

QUOTE (briv1016 @ Oct 11 2008, 08:24 PM)

But, according to the tracking site Spirit already has 1100Mb filled and that number is only going to go up as the panorama is completed. How much memory is really onboard?

I don't think there is any discrepancy here, since 1100 Mb is just over 137 megabytes and resides within the 256 megabytes flash memory.

Posted by: djellison Oct 12 2008, 04:26 AM

QUOTE (briv1016 @ Oct 12 2008, 01:24 AM)

1100Mb

1100 megaBITS

Which is 137 megaBYTES

Posted by: briv1016 Oct 12 2008, 04:42 AM

My bad, I confused bits and bytes.

Posted by: PhilCo126 Oct 29 2008, 06:36 PM

I remember that both MERs use the VxWorks Real-Time Operating System ( VxWorks RTOS) but I don't know how large each MER's memory is. I believe 256 MB non-volatile Flash memory + 128 MB volatile RAM ?

Posted by: mcaplinger Oct 29 2008, 06:59 PM

What part of post #1 is confusing?

If you do a google search for RAD6000 and read the BAE product brochure, you'll see that these boards also have 3MB of EEPROM.