Writing Code for Spacecraft

Posted by michael on Saturday November 20, 2004 @06:37AM 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.'"

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Re:my satellite debugging experience by Tablizer · 2004-11-20 11:56 · Score: 0, Offtopic

I worked on a satellite mission where we had some trouble. Due to an error the satellite wound up pointing 16 degrees away from the sun in a higher-than-expected orbit of 443 miles (714 kilometers) above Earth.

Nil, perhaps you should have posted anonymously. Now we will all avoid anyone named "Nil" on our space teams. BTW, do you have a brother named "Null"?

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