Mars rover Curiosity’s software upgraded

http://www.firstpost.com/tech/mars-rover-curiositys-software-upgraded-1301509.html

by aritraghosh007 • 13 years ago

78 31 13 years ago

firstpost.com

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

It's so cool that we can stream software updates across 34 million miles.

rzimmerman3• 13 years ago

It's also cool that the update was sent partly through the MRO spacecraft, then forwarded down to the surface.

aroch2• 13 years ago

I get nervous sometimes when flashing ROMs on my phone...And those were downloaded over a (comparatively) 0-latency connection with high throughput. Fact that sending a firmware to Mars is apparently a normal thing now notwithstanding, I find this incredible.

bad_alloc• 13 years ago

The rover has got two computers though and during upgrades only one is updated. If something goes wrong, the non-updated one takes over and they can restore the last working state. Phones are easy to brick since they lack a backup system.

nknighthb4• 13 years ago

The ease with which many consumer devices can be bricked by firmware updates is really ridiculous, though. You don't need full hardware redundancy to virtually eliminate them, just a redundant OS partition and a little sane engineering. At that point, any bricking is almost certain to be the result of an actual hardware failure, which is its own problem.

rzimmerman3• 13 years ago

The first attempt at this upgrade did have some issues:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-325

The software reset and booted back into the older version. There are some really good safeguards against bricking anything, but it's still scary. Especially with the data latencies involved - in this case the team had several hours between knowing "something's wrong" and getting more data.

atsaloli3• 13 years ago

A lot of work has gone into making that software especially robust, including some custom tooling for facilitating peer review. Dr. Holzmann (formerly of Bell Labs, birthplace of Unix) heads JPL's Laboratory for Reliable Software to lead this work.

If you'd like to learn more, I written about the LARS methodology after hearing Dr. Holzmann at USENIX Hot Topics in Dependable Software: http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/making_robust_software/

noir_lord• 13 years ago

Fascinating, this type of programming has always interested me (as I was a desktop developer who moved to the web) but not something I think I'd want to do (the stress alone must be horrific when you work on any mission critical/safety critical software).

noselasd• 13 years ago

Though what you describe covers only the code. The design is just as big a part of the picture and is just as much involved in the verification, revising, reviewing and testing.

atsaloli3• 13 years ago

Excellent point, thank you.

mturmon• 13 years ago

And here is some more on Gerard's setup:

http://gerard.holzmann.usesthis.com

cpeterso• 13 years ago

Thanks for your article. It was very interesting to read about the development of such "serious" software. :)

atsaloli3• 13 years ago

You are very welcome!

johnw• 13 years ago

Also interesting is the amount of damage being done to the wheels as it drives around up there. Some good pictures of that here[1]. Apparently the wheels are designed to leave a mark so they can keep track of the rovers location by looking at the tracks[2]. The tracks spell out JPL in morse code.

[1] http://news.discovery.com/space/martian-wear-and-tear-curios...

[2] http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2013/1002210...

nknighthb4• 13 years ago

Considering the hole is non-structural and it's more than halfway through the original planned mission duration, those wheels look fine to me!

I wouldn't mind seeing the progression, though, since they say it's accelerated recently on the rough terrain.

ams6110• 13 years ago

"It appears to be correlated with driving over rougher terrain."

Who'd have thought....

hnriot• 13 years ago

When I read the article that also popped out for me.

Unbelievably obvious. Obviously somethings are different in the Martian environment, but the laws of physics didn't just look the other way when they saw the rover coming.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Thanks for the links, I figured that the lack of compliance in the "tire" section of the wheels would be an issue but that is a bit more damage than I would expect. I am guessing that under some driving conditions you might get up to 50% of the rover weight on a wheel and if that was while the wheel was rolling over a rock, the tendency would be to cut into the aluminium. So one wonders why not titanium outer rims? or a compliance system that would allow the wheel to deform until enough weight had been distributed across enough surface area to keep it under the 'minimal damage' threshold.

fabriceleal• 13 years ago

Possibly cool idea: build a Curiosity emulator/simulator. Build the o.s. for it and/or user-space (does any of those concepts apply? probably not) software for it.

Does this already exist? This looks like it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/marsroversim/

cypher543• 13 years ago

Curiosity definitely has an OS (VxWorks). But I asked one of the developers about releasing some code after Curiosity landed and was told that they couldn't. So I doubt an accurate Curiosity emulator will ever be possible unless JPL releases their code 45 years from now like NASA did with Apollo 11's guidance system. (https://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/)

raverbashing• 13 years ago

They usually have terrestrial duplicates where tests occur and bug troubleshooting is done

rzimmerman3• 13 years ago

I believe that the software technically falls under certain US export restrictions which is probably one reason it isn't made public.

waqasx• 13 years ago

A day later... "Adobe Acrobat Reader needs to update"

Mars rover Curiosity’s software upgraded

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