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by d33 2675 days ago
So, in other words, the machine's still alive, but has no backup CPU?
2 comments

"Opportunity likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault and an up-loss timer fault. The team is continuing to listen for the rover over a broad range of times, frequencies and polarizations using the Deep Space Network (DSN) Radio Science Receiver. The team has begun mission clock fault recovery commanding 'in the blind,' in the hopes of catching the rover during an awake period, as their strategy of last resort."

Source: NASA mission update for sols 5340-5346 (Jan. 31-Feb. 6, 2019) https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover-status/opportunity/r...

The linked AP article does not indicate that a failure of the CPU is the issue here (it does not indicate much beyond this vague sentence: "its internal clock possibly so scrambled that it no longer knew when to sleep or wake up to receive commands"). What do you mean with "alive", that it still has power?