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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.
Sadly this country is full of twerps who believe that anything that doesn't lead to a private entity making a profit immediately isn't worry anything. They think that doing anything that benefits others is useless, even if it also benefits them. Of course they have no concept of what words like socialism actually mean, and simply hurl then around as though everyone will and should perceive them as an insult.
It's a mental illness, and not only do they not seem to have a treatment for it, nobody's actually looking for one either.