Mars Rovers' Software Upgraded

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday January 1, 2007 @10:45AM from the little-bots-that-could dept.

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."

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Re:Obligatory comment by pdbaby · 2007-01-01 12:43 · Score: 4, Interesting

Nothing against Java, it just wasn't my impression that it was used for any NASA stuff
Apparently they have quite a lot of Java software for their client-side apps too. It's an interesting sort of history: they seem to have inspired Gosling to a degree, and they mainly chose Java because of platform agnosticism (I'm guessing they run a lot of different processors on their missions). I'm guessing the safety of Java compared to C is also handy.

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Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"