For the first time since it landed on Mars, the Opportunity rover will soon receive a flash memory reformat, according to a NASA press release.

NASA's Opportunity rover landed on Mars back in early 2004 along with the Spirit rover. The two rovers were only supposed to explore the planet for three months, but Spirit lasted six years and Opportunity is still active.

So does this mean Opportunity is coming home? Probably not.

Though the NASA rover is approximately 125 million miles away from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the space agency said that it is possible to do a reformat for a machine in space. At this point the JPL just needs to make the necessary preparations to verify that the reformatting scheduled for next month won't cause any issues.

All useful data currently stored within the rover's flash memory will be downloaded, and then the rover will be switched to an operating mode which doesn't require flash memory use. Communication sessions will then be programmed to utilize a slower data rate, according to the release.

The JPL was pushed to do a reformat on the rover's flash memory since the number of resets Opportunity requires was starting to grow. In August alone the rover needed 12 resets, and with each one the rover needed about a day or so to recover.

This tales away time the rover could've used to explore the Red Planet.

Flash memory keeps data even when power is off. It is the type used for storing photos and music on smart phones or digital cameras, among many other devices.

Repeated use wears out these cells so that begin to malfunction overtime, according to NASA. Reformatting clears the data to give the memory a fresh start while also identifying bad cells so that they can be avoided the next time the cells are used.

"Worn-out cells in the flash memory are the leading suspect in causing these resets," said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, project manager for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project, according to the release. "The flash reformatting is a low-risk process, as critical sequences and flight software are stored elsewhere in other non-volatile memory on the rover."

The Mars Exploration Rover Project is just one element of NASA's ongoing and upcoming Mars missions preparing for an eventual human mission to the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s. 

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