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Software Patch Fixes Mars Curiosity Rover's Auto-focus Glitch
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory have successfully uploaded and applied a software patch to NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars. The patch fixes a focusing problem that cropped up in November when the laser that helps to focus one of its cameras failed. "Without this laser rangefinder, the ChemCam instrument was somewhat blind," said Roger Wiens, ChemCam principal investigator at Los Alamos. "The main laser that creates flashes of plasma when it analyzes rocks and soils up to 25 feet [7.6 meters] from the rover was not affected, but the laser analyses only work when the telescope projecting the laser light to the target is in focus." Before the fix, scientists had to shoot images at nine different focus settings to distill a decent set of data. Now, they say the new software results in better images in a single shot than even before the laser broke down. The program that runs the instrument is only 40 kilobytes in size.
Me, I wish the code for the Space Shuttle was available. The shuttles are now decommissioned and sitting in museums and no country wanting to build any kind of shuttle or space plane is going to be replicating a 40 year old American design when there are far better ways to do it nowadays so there shouldn't be any risk to national security in releasing the code (not to mention that the code alone isn't enough to rebuild the computer system, let alone the whole shuttle).
Sharing software makes the world richer, not poorer...
Can you prove this? I'd say that is totally untrue. Nice try, though, Mr Socialist.