The Software Behind the Mars Phoenix Lander

chromatic writes "Imagine managing a million lines of code to send over seven hundred pounds of equipment millions of miles through space to land safely on Mars and perform dozens of experiments. You have C, 128 MB of RAM, and very few opportunities to retry if you get it wrong. O'Reilly News interviewed Peter Gluck, project software engineer for NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, about the process of writing software and managing these constraints — and why you're unlikely to see the source code to the project any time soon."

Comments

Re:128MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

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You know

[geekoid]

if they wrote it in perl, it would only be 1 line.

Re:You know

[MadnessASAP]

Yes, but it would use the unholy letters of the dark lord himself, and bring death and destruction upon any man who gazed upon its ghastly source.

hello.c

[xx_chris]

#include void main() { printf("Hello Mars\n"); }