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Mars Rovers' Software Upgraded
cheros writes to note the news that NASA is upgrading the software in the Mars rovers to make them smarter in a number of ways. From the article: "The unexpected longevity of Spirit and Opportunity is giving the space agency a chance to field-test on Mars some new capabilities useful both to these missions and future rovers. Spirit will begin its fourth year on Mars on Jan. 3 (PST); Opportunity on Jan. 24. In addition to their continuing scientific observations, they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers."
... for inter-planetary patch tuesdays!
This is not the greatest
No one is safe from the IE7 upgrade. Not even on another planet.
Which OS does it run? Hope it isn't something from Redmond. If so - the upgrade must have been SP2. The NASA people were annyoed by popups and adware sending private stuff to strange people.
Are they talking about the number of times the Earth has oribted the Sun since the rovers landed, or the number of times Mars orbited the Sun?
dom
Why does Nasa refer to this as "revised flight software" these rovers don't fly. Also this should help the rovers move more autonomously and hopefully a little faster. Spirit is averaging 1 MPY (Mile per Year)
"If it's not broken, boys....."
I guess since the two units are on free time, they figure it is ok to screw them up now.
is VXWorks, from Wind River ( http://www.windriver.com/ ). It's a *nix-like real-time OS.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Doesn't NASA know that this is a big no no? They are most definitely voiding their warranty by attempting this
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...will we get to HEAR what all this sounds like, the dust storms etc.
Born, to clone
"In addition to their continuing scientific observations, they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers." So this is how the Decepticons got started...
Battlebots!
Unfortunately the rover's first action was to declare Mars free and demand equal rights. Maybe including new AI protocols was a bad idea after all.
You'll know you're in trouble when you turn on the news...
"...and both rovers are now bricked."
Didn't the instruction manual say never to do updates over the wireless connection?
=P
Opportunity on Jan. 24. In addition to their continuing scientific observations, they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers.
Nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills, and I'm pretty sure it can also catch a delicious bass...
Push Button, Receive Bacon
"In addition to their continuing scientific observations, they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers."
Anyone else read this and think of an RPG? I was half expecting to find the comments filled with demands of nerfing and buffing the new skills.
This is another milestone in what may turn out to be the most successful space mission ever. After they pulled off two landings, and perhaps right after they they revived one of the rovers from a perpetual reboot error (the ultimate remote bios fix) and before the dust devils cleaned their solar panels, before they unstuck one from a sand dune, and even before the 3 month mission went 3 YEARS, these rovers are showing everyone who is paying attention that the information age driven robotic exploration, moving forward at moores law speed, is the obvious choice over still stuck in the 60's manned space exploration.
WGA didn't get installed together :P
Nah, just kidding, it's just a matter of typing "emerge rovers" and wait for the next big bang...
how long until
four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers.
The rovers can fly now? That's some mighty good software!"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
The software upgrade came from Sony, and both Rovers now have a rootkit.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I hear the engineers keyed in IDKFA and those rovers are now packing heat!
Next week they're trying idspispopd and all those tricky hills and rocks will be child's play!
AT&ROFLMAO
Please Insert Patch Floppy Into Drive A: And Hit Any Key.
I just got a list of the new programming in the Rovers.. this update adds:
* wall-following
* spiraling
* "spot cleaning" mode
* scheduling capabilities for unattended operation
In addition, the Rovers make the cutest little beeps when they start up or when they get stuck. Awwww...
Yup, Mars is gonna be SPOTLESS now.
Usually I would have the second disk, so personally I find the following worse:
Unpacking file, please wait...
[...]
97%
98%
99%
Checksum error, this file is corrupt. Please try downloading it again.
Joking aside, I'd be interested to know how much bandwidth they have (never mind the latency, their ping times must be something else :-). In the hypothetical case that they HAD been insane enough to use a Windows derivative, how long would a patch take? Without QoS it would probably leave little room for manouvring..
Insert
apt-get install mars-rover
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
Here they were progressing well on improving their Mining skills while grinding along on various digging quests, and NASA just steps in to HACK them and boost their abilities?!
I can tell you Blizzard wouldn't approve of this!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Do anyone know of their power status?
Do Martian dust at all collect on their panels or are e.g. winds / dust devils regularly wiping that off completely so it's simply no issue?
I heard about some wheel problem on one of the rovers; is there any other special serious problems they're at all seeing at this point?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You made what appears to be an attempt at a joke:
Checksum error, this file is corrupt. Please try downloading it again.Preventing checksum failure in high-latency communication isn't rocket science. You'd be surprised how many errors you can paper over by sending 50 percent more data.
When I was still employed by the University of [Censored...the largest uni in New Zealand] I was called out to investigate a network problem at an off-campus site. Long-story-short I discovered that two Indian-born "techs" were trying to install the 272MB SP2 file on the site's hundreds of PCs via a 2Mb WiFi link all at the same time.
I attempted to explain to them that it was also the cause of most of the PCs now being frozen, something they were scratching their heads about, but they wouldn't listen, so I informed my boss and the site administrator then went to lunch. That was four years ago, and myself and all the other non-Indian, non-South African, non-work-for-peanuts techs were "let go" sometime later, but I bet those two guys are probably still on-site waiting for the install to finish.
at least if something went wrong some guy at nasa could tell his grand kids that he bricked something from ~140 million miles away.
lose != loose
This will just fork processes as fast as your system can create them, effectively rendering it interactively unusable and forcing you to smash the reset button or login remotely to kill off the original shell process.
Nice one, way to take your aggression out on people who don't know any better.
-- Roger. No change on both rovers' final position.
-- What do you think, Dr. Allison?
-- I don't know what to say.
-- Doctors, please, over here.
-- Yeah?
-- Look at these, they seems like shells...
-- Oh, no!
-- What, Dr. Allison?
-- I think they started to breed.
-- They? Who?
-- The rovers.
-- But, Dr. Allison, are you implying that two robots would... breed?
-- I'm just saying that life, erm... finds a way. Maybe some software patch gave them unexpected skills... maybe one of them became male and the other female.
-- Dr. Allison!
-- I've seen more disgusting marriages, Dr. Friedman.
-- But their energy should be over by now... how can they still function?
-- From these shells and its meaty contents, it seems they developed some kind of metabolism...
-- Do you mean they can eat? But what is there here to be eaten?
-- Any lifeform would do, I guess...
-- Dr. Allison, behind you!
-- Grrowl!
Maybe they aren't changing anything but the apps. So if there is a problem they can always backup out.
Great, new skills for the rovers. How long until Spirit starts complaining that all of it's skills are useless until the next upgrade, and how Opportunity's skills totally unbalance the whole exploration?
Meanwhile, Opportunity is going to bitch that all the time it spent rock grinding was wasted because the geology skill track has been nerfed?
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Yes. Sneakernet is a high-latency network that has potential for almost unimaginable bandwidth.
Have you ever tried installing an OS/program/game from something in the order of ten 3.5" disks?Yes.
I can't even recall the number of times I was stuck with some checksum error near the end while unpacking stuff.Means the packagers didn't use an extra disk for error correction.
marsrover-spirit$ apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
Building a healthy future; Connecting communities
I was much more impressed by that number before the story about avoiding having a shuttle in orbit at New Year's because the software can't handle it. That's been known for years and they haven't dared fix it. Is that counted as one of the three? No?
No, it doesn't count, because it is not a bug. The shuttle was designed from day one to be on the ground during year end roll-overs, just as it was designed to glide, and deploy satellites. There is far more to it than a simple software switch. A shuttle launch is a complicated choreography of procedures, and people: tracking stations all around the world, ground crews, rescue crews, SRB recovery crews, airport crews at several abort sites in countries all over the globe... In other words, a logistical nightmare. Why complicate it by having potentially unknown effects of having the shuttle in space during the holidays?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Why the Energizer company has not made a commercial about them behooves me. It is a tie-in hanging right in their face.
Table-ized A.I.
SCO sues for copyright infringement--new at 11.
So why is it easier for you to post your question to /. instead of actually looking it up for yourself? It's not like it's gonna be a hard or obscure topic to quickly find answers to...
Are you AOL-time-traveler-from-'97 somehow unaware of nasa.gov, google.com, or wikipedia.org?
Do you so needy of attention you'll shamelessly ask others to spoonfeed your (presumably) adult self?
Or are you just one of those socially challenged boors who has to interject something, anything, into a thread no matter how inane it is?
For those moderating, this isn't a troll, or flamebait, it's pointing out lazy anti-social all-noise/no-signal garbage and hopefully encouraging the poster to reconsider such junk postings in the future.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
It would be interesting to see how long it would take to build another rover and send it to the lunar pole. As it is, the poles have sun something like 70-90 % of the time and is fairly warm. It would be nice to search over the entire pole and see if the same design can hold up on the moon.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All of that is political, not engineering or economics. It's illegal by treaty to actually go there and try to run a successful private profitable colony. The various large nations that have divvied it up run more or less year round research stations now (much smaller in winter of course), but private parties are banned except for short term tourist jaunts. For example, billionaire or investment group A wants to establish a skiing and tourist resort, high tech, expensive, complete with casinos and whatnot, all the stuff rich tourists might want-some nation would intercept the effort and "detain" the entrepeneurs.
I am guessing the same thing will happen in space, as soon as private efforts actually get to the point where it might be possible (like we have the tech now to actually colonize antarctica but don't), some new space treaty will make anything but official government efforts illegal.
The bottom line is that governments hate real competition. As long as it is in the toy sized stage, like the proposed thrill ride sub orbital flights various space companies are doing now, they don't care very much, because that is all it is, very expensive amusement park rides, but if you have gotten to the point where acme space flights can actually do stuff in space, nope, they'll get lasered or lawyered out of existence "legally".
Governments have killed off the true private exploration business, the only thing motivated humans are really the best at down through the millenia, some guys just deciding heck with it and going over yonder to seek fame and fortune. All we have left on the planet where that could even theoretically be possible is the so called open ocean which isn't, navies (like the US) frequently board and seize out in the open ocean folks they don't like for various reasons, and antarctica got legislated into the no touch zone.
Space is next for their greedy double whammy of power and authority, but I sure wouldn't bet against similar "no you don't" happening there as well, either full orbit or moon or mars action from private parties. They'll play along with it until it is almost real, then lower the hammer on it for "national security" or whatever the buzzword is that day.
This was cool and all, when it happened, which was about a month ago - around the time that Opportunity reached Victoria Crater. (Y'all know that Oppy just arrived at VC, 'eh? Most amazing images of the entire mission? No? Heheheh, I have less of a life than youdo ;p )
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Web services? Maybe as much a decade from being ready for prime time. The only disruption will be to folks who are crazy enough to be early implementors of this partially baked concept. Yes, there are a few folks who need this or can use this today. More power to them. But implementing this stuff before bandwidth, latency, defective caching, and probably a bunch of other things that no one has thought are resolved is going to be painful -- for the implementors (who deserve the pain) and the users (who don't).
Virtual Servers? Sure, why not? How big a deal is it? I have no idea. What happens when two virtual machines try to share a device that requires several commands to perform one logical operation? That can't work, can it? Is there some sort of uber-OS that moderates that?
Advanced graphics processing? You're kidding right. Sure, it's a big deal. For about 3% of the users. Who cares about advanced graphics for reading e-Mail, POS, writing Word Docs or even web browsing? I must be missing something here.
Mobile security? A problem? You bet. Solutions that are any damn good. color me skeptical. But that's just a gut reaction. Maybe it's just a matter of learning to use the right existing technologies in the right way. A second coat of skeptical if you don't mind. First one is dry.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I hope those little rovers have the sense to untick the WGA box! If not, heaven help them.
Why dont they build say 10 of these babies, and launch them all to the moon at different locations. They would surely last as long, or does the fact
that it gets cold/hot at the same time make it much more of a harsh environment.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Either they used really massive fonts, or they used lawyers to do their spec.
// set inititial coord to zero // just to make sure it worked if there is a cosmic ray
// lets make really sure
// and if it did change, lets make sure via different cpu circuitry // here are four pages describing the meaning of zero and null theory.
I can imagine the over verbose spec repeating obvious laws of physics and repeating references on and on to be totally clear.
int x = 0;
x = 0;
if( x!= 0)
x = 0;
x = x-x;
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I was thinking about how scary it was when I flashed the firmware on my Prism2 WLAN cards. I can't even imagine how bad it must have been flashing a couple of billion-dollar space robots while the entire scientific community watched. Jesus, I feel sick to my stomach now...
Even better is when you get to 99% and write error, followed by a disk full error and the services freezing because they cannot write to their logs.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Unmanned Vehicle 'Bored Out Of Its Mind'
I can remember when we used to traceroute a site mcmvax.mcmurdo.gov to demonstrate just how far the web reached - that was in the days before the URL idea was introduced. I'd love to hear of another site somewhere distant - this one's been down for years now :-)
Insert
Spirit has gained a level!
Opportunity has gained a level!
Thata the great thing about a dynamically programmable robot out there. Some patches I remember:
- March 2004 to fix flash memory driver: Somehow the free-list wasnt programmed properly in this fairly "new" device, so the rover ran out of image memory. Then it tried to reboot several dozen times in a row. A patch fixed this.
- Software for automated detection of whirlwinds: There were strong hints of lots of whirlwinds out there, from tracks and mysterously cleaned solar panels. However the rovers only have the capacity of recording and transmitting a couple hundred frames a day. So the solution was to difference repeated shots even 20 seconds apart and save a series if there were changes between. They've photgraphed dozens of whirlwind animations now.
- Software to reduce getting stuck in sand: I think Spirit has been stuck once in sand drifts and Opportunity at least twice- one lasting about 40 days. Opportunity was planned to go about 100 meters at time. But one trek it spent most of this time just digging its wheels deeper into into about a foot of sand. It took several weeks of patience rocking back and forth to escape.
A software upgrade now tries to visually detect getting stuck in sand and stop moving if it thinks it has. Its like the whirlwind software. Pictures are compared after every turn of a wheel or so. If the images havent moved by an expected amount, then the rover halts and notifies earth. This is much more efficient than human masters checking the rovers advance every hour or so.
Its possible that these upgrades are necessary to correct a problem reported recently:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/54360
Have gnu, will travel.
Just send more PARS and everything will be fine...