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Writing Code for Spacecraft

Posted by michael on from the carried-the-bits-uphill-one-by-one-in-the-snow dept.

CowboyRobot writes "In an article subtitled, "And you think *your* operating system needs to be reliable." Queue has an interview with the developer of the OS that runs on the Mars Rovers. Mike Deliman, chief engineer of operating systems at Wind River Systems, has quotes like, 'Writing the code for spacecraft is no harder than for any other realtime life- or mission-critical application. The thing that is hard is debugging a problem from another planet.' and, 'The operating system and kernel fit in less than 2 megabytes; the rest of the code, plus data space, eventually exceeded 30 megabytes.'"

5 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Reinventing the wheel. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Should have just used WinCE, with a few of the productivity apps cut out. Adding a copy of pocket Auto-route, with some Martian JPEGS would have helped navigation as well.

  2. Re:Summary of OS code by caramelcarrot · · Score: 5, Funny

    c:\rover\code\main.cpp(3) : error C2106: '=' : left operand must be l-value

    Not quite bug free yet.

  3. Re:Summary of OS code by zeath · · Score: 5, Funny

    roveros.c: 1: non-lvalue in assignment
    make: *** [roveros] Error 1 I'm sorry, your rover is lost in space. Insert $1 billion and press any key to try again.

  4. Re:hmm... by Infinityis · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not gonna happen, for one big reason. I could just see the Slashdot headline:

    Mars Rover HaX0r3d and OS replaced with Linux.

    Shortly thereafter, Micro$oft claims that they can enforce patent infringement on Mars...

  5. Huh, its easy.. by adeyadey · · Score: 5, Funny

    you are in a red rocky landscape..

    GO NORTH..

    you are in a red rocky landscape..

    DIG.

    ok. you see some red sand.
    it is getting dark.

    GO NORTH..

    you were eaten by a grue.

    --
    "You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"