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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.
Doesn't NASA know that this is a big no no? They are most definitely voiding their warranty by attempting this
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Why does Nasa refer to this as "revised flight software" these rovers don't fly
They're flying right now - in an orbit that matches mars very closely.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
is VXWorks, from Wind River ( http://www.windriver.com/ [windriver.com] ). It's a *nix-like real-time OS.
And as soon as SCO beats IBM, Novell, and AutoZone like bongo drums in court they're going after NASA. "All Your UNIX Are Belong To Us."
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.
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
Ahhh . . . that explains the little tire tracks that start and end at my Linksys router. ;-)
Yeah, but they can play "Home on the Range" in Dolby 7.1 now.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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!
Or is this the result of the CYA era, in which the engineers had to promise a certain longevity, and nobody was willing to risk more than a 90 day promise.
That reminds me of when Scotty told LaForge to overshoot his estimates to the Captain by a factor of four to maintain his reputation as a miracle worker.
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.
apt-get install mars-rover
I'm assuming that was done before launching it, now they just have to upgrade sources.list and then run:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Actually I'm talking about disks, following the parent (do they also count as high-latency communication?!?).
Have you ever tried installing an OS/program/game from something in the order of ten 3.5" disks?
I can't even recall the number of times I was stuck with some checksum error near the end while unpacking stuff. Glad we have USB sticks now!
No joke either, many wasted hours if added over the last two decades. =/
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
I think you meant to say "ping times must be out of this world".
I am the inventor of the hilarious refrigerator alarm.
Wrong planet. They should've sent them to Jupiter.
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
No, you don't understand. It's "flight" as in "fight or flight". This software detects an attack by the Martians and makes the rovers scurry away into some marshole. Hopefully with the next update they learn to defend themselves too.
Why does Nasa refer to this as "revised flight software" these rovers don't fly.
When they install the Roover Control (R) SP2, they will...
So say we all