Mars Rovers' Software Upgraded 177
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."
This paves the way... (Score:5, Funny)
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Tuesdays, every week for Vista, once a month for the rovers
sounds about right.
Patching to Mars.. (Score:2)
Re:Patching to Mars.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This paves the way... (Score:5, Funny)
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That article doesn't say anything about what software is running on the Mars Rovers.
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You must submit.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You must submit.... (Score:5, Funny)
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- IE 7.0 update
- Better music search function
- Improved battery life
- Solves "mooing" sound problem
- Sony Lion battery bypass
- XBox 360 HD-DVD computability
- Windows Genuine Advantage
- New "Glass" GUI
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What's a "year"? (Score:3, Insightful)
dom
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Well, considering Spirit landed in January 2004, I think you can figure that out for yourself.
Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
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They're flying right now - in an orbit that matches mars very closely.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
It's just a standard term. At NASA, "flight" software is mission software which executes within a spacecraft computer. "Ground" software usually refers to that which is used for spacecraft control/ground support (the software in the control center on Earth).
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When they install the Roover Control (R) SP2, they will...
Brings to mind... (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess since the two units are on free time, they figure it is ok to screw them up now.
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Re:Brings to mind... (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I know the On-Board Shuttle Software Group [fastcompany.com] has a track record of 3 (in words: 'three') software bugs in installed operating code within 30 years of writing code. That's all the code running on the Orbiters regular systems, exept only the third-party experiments with own systems and a non-critical original mid-nineties Thinkpad or two they take along
To give you a picture of what they have to deal with: A timing mistake in some piece of the shuttles navigation code by one cpu clockcount would put the shuttle 3 miles off course.
The Voyager Software Team reprogrammed a 20 year old device 3-quarters across the solar system to send color pictures instead of black and white - with a system that was only built to picture and send black and white.
You have not the slightest idea what these spacecraft-software guys are capable of and how insanely bulletproof their code is.
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Re:Brings to mind... (Score:4, Interesting)
I was much more impressed by that number before the story about avoiding having a shuttle in orbit at New Year's because the software can't handle it. That's been known for years and they haven't dared fix it. Is that counted as one of the three? No? Then they've fixed only three bugs in the last 30 years, and they have more than that, unless you think a serious misdesign is not a bug. If I confused the presence of bugs with having fixes for them, didn't consider a serious misdesign to be a bug, and had barely added a real feature in 30 years (at current head count, 7,800 man-years), I too could claim some ridiculously low bug count.
It also seems to me that the shuttle group's software situation is totally irrelevant to anyone but the shuttle group. Look at this part of the article you mentioned:
That sort of rigidity makes their methodology totally useless for software outside NASA. I occasionally hear people talk about how the Shuttle Group does software right, but for non-life critical systems, the cure is worse than the disease. Give me our full-featured, buggy software over nothing any day. There's got to be a better way.
I suspect it's also useless to the other groups in NASA. Do you actually know that the Mars Rover software was written in this manner?
Re:Brings to mind... (Score:5, Informative)
In all fairness that's a software requirement (or lack of one) that the shuttle flight software group does not have control of. As has been rehashed several times on slashdot, the shuttle program early on took the savings from not building that capability into the ground and flight software (it's not quite as simple as it seems). It only became a problem recently when it restricted certain launch windows, and now the shuttle program is paying to add it in.
That sort of rigidity makes their methodology totally useless for software outside NASA.
As you say, it's totally useless for non-life critical systems. However, outside of NASA I know of DOD applications such ballistic missile guidance are equally as rigid.
Give me our full-featured, buggy software over nothing any day
As someone who has depended on NASA flight software, I'd rather sacrifice features for bug free code. That's a basic difference between consumer software and mission critical software.
I suspect it's also useless to the other groups in NASA. Do you actually know that the Mars Rover software was written in this manner?
No other group at NASA writes flight software like this, because Shuttle is the only man rated launch vehicle. Orion will be similar (and it's software is being written by the same people). Other flight software at NASA is not this extreme, but there is a NASA software development standard for all flight software and it's still pretty rigid compared to consumer software.
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Agreed. If my life were depending on it, I'd want code written in this way, too. The rest of the time, I want my shiny OpenGL-accelerated windows zipping around the screen, and I realize that writing "QUALITY" in giant, bold, all-caps letters at the top of the priority list (above "not wildly exceeding our meager budget" and
Nasa is good at rocket science. (Score:2)
No, it doesn't count, because it is not a bug. The shuttle was designed from day one to be on the ground during year end roll-overs, just as it was designed to glide, and deploy satellites. There is far more to it than a simple software switch. A shuttle l
2.5 lines per page of spec? (Score:2)
I can imagine the over verbose spec repeating obvious laws of physics and repeating references on and on to be totally clear.
int x = 0;
x = 0;
if( x!= 0)
x = 0;
x = x-x;
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An AC replied: Strange, I thought all those computers on board the Shuttle, ISS etc. were actually doing something other than an idle loop.
The point is that they wrote 420,000 lines of code in 30 years and an estimated 7,800 man-years. That's 14,000 lines per year, or 54 lines per man-year. Considering that I can single-handedly outperform their entire team of 260 people, those had better be 420,000 glorious lines of code. Furthermo
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Well let's not forget that not only are lives on the line but the equipment the software controls are worth "Billions" of dollars. Another point is the National prestige and reputation of not having a shuttle blow up every mission (Note: No mission disasters have been caused by faulty software). Software errors in this context can severely taint the reputation of the Nation.
I'd say NASA's software practices are prudent and entirely appropriate. I woul
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You're missing my point. They're appropriate for the shuttle group, where lives depend on the code. Nowhere else. The Mars Rover code is not made to this standard, and consumer code could never be. It's impossible. Anyone who points to this as an example of how we should all be writing code is simply wrong.
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Re:Brings to mind... (Score:4, Interesting)
2.) "You have not the slightest idea what these spacecraft-software guys are capable of and how insanely bulletproof their code is."
You simplify things to no end, I see...sorry for that. Let's start, and end, with the failure to convert from standard to metric that caused that one Mars surface mission fail, shall we? Opps. The best software in the galaxy means nothing if the overall effort isn't done right, so please don't worry that someone may have made fun of just the code
I'm not talking about JUST the software... I am talking about the overall logic of the tasked individuals and their efforts that lead to decisions such as this one, which in this case, happened to involve software specifically, but certainly not only. The original live time for these two rovers was 90 days - after that, new ideas are on the table...that's why it is called 'free' time, because it is all 'extra' time that was never planned for and now begs to be utilized.
As good a thing as that is, someone, sooner or later, is going to ask the question why didn't they know this? And for anyone that shouts "This is Mars! anything can happen!", yes, of course...but why did the original plan not include at least some options for extended runs then, instead of working them now as if the two units were a sandbox, that's all I'm saying.
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IIRC they did have extended mission plans should the rovers last an additional few days to weeks.
We are talking a (wonderful) over-run of available time of 1600% (1/4 year designed Vs. 4/1 year actual). I would never plan for that much good fortune. Heck, I don't think I would plan for even 200% of designed time available, thouth I may immagine it, kinda like I immagine winning the lottery.
-nB
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Or is this the r
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That reminds me of when Scotty told LaForge to overshoot his estimates to the Captain by a factor of four to maintain his reputation as a miracle worker.
Re:Brings to mind... (Score:5, Informative)
This is a very good question. There's a very good, but not well known answer.
Mars has a lot of dust. Earlier missions got a good dusting on the landers and rover (Viking 1 and 2, Mars Pathfinder and the Sojurner rover). The more modern missions use solar cells for power, which are blocked slowly over time as dust builds up.
Dust accumulation on Mars solar cell arrays was a big problem within the early and mid-1990s Mars research community. Researcher Geoff Landis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Landis [wikipedia.org]) had an experiment on the Sojurner rover with a solar cell with a little movable cover glass on it, to see how much dust accumulated over time. Results from that were a prediction that solar arrays would lose most of their power over say four to six months.
Geoff had another experiment on the Mars Surveyor 2001 lander mission, which was supposed to try using static electricity to remove all the dust off a test cell, but the mission was cancelled after the Mars Polar Lander / Mars Climate Orbiter losses.
The two Mars Exploration Rovers were the next landers we sent. The expectation was that they'd last at least 3 months (90 days), and the hope was that nothing else would wear out until the solar arrays were too obscured for them to be able to power up properly anymore, perhaps six months or so into the mission.
What actually happened is one of those unexpected bonuses that the universe throws at you at random intervals. It turns out that the Mars winds at the height of the MER solar panels are just enough stronger than they are closer to the ground that the MER solar panels built up a moderate load of dust and stabilized there. There's plenty enough power remaining (except for mid-winter on Mars) for the rovers to keep operating, and it looks like the whole solar array dust problem just goes away if you put the arrays up off the ground.
There were some people who hoped that the arrays would be kept clean by the winds, but the best models we had before the MER rovers landed was that the winds weren't nearly strong enough. Pleasant suprise, and one that makes future missions a lot easier than we'd been afraid they were going to be. But not something which was taken into account in the MER designs to start with.
There was no expectation that the arrays would last more than about six months; designing anything else to last much longer than that, other than for safety's sake to make sure that nothing else failed before the solar cells dusted up, didn't seem to make any sense beforehand.
The next two Mars rovers are going to be powered by radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) anyways, so that they can keep driving at night and in wintertime, now that we know that the basic MER design mechanisms will last for many years on the surface. Being able to turn on some headlights and keep driving at night should triple their effectiveness or better.
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A wiper mechanism would be complex, add mass, have to survive the take-off and landing, and operate reliably in very cold temperatures. Not impossible, but a challenge (I think the Mercedes guys could give them a few headlamp wiper modules that probably are already well-enough designed.)
It sounds like there isn't enough air for a small fan to do much, and a larger fan would add even more volume a
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I wonder if a vertical solar panel wouldn't have been a better design, one that employed gravity to prevent the dust from settling.
It would probably reduce some of the dust, but would be much less efficient due to its orientation. You want the cells aimed at the sun for best collection, otherwise each 1M^2 of panel will only collect tan(angle of cells to the angle of the suns rays)*length*width, which at high-noon with the sun directly overhead, would be 0. A mechanism to rotate the cells would add complexity, weight, and another critical failure point. Without a good anti-static coating that doesnt reduce ffeciency by blocking ligh
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1b. hence, they cannot get off the ground very high, but the air should be more dense at the lower 1 foot.
2. Vertical solar panels can just use a mirror to reflect the above sunlight 45deg towards the panels, also add more mirrors and enhance the power.
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1. I thought that the super low air density makes it really hard for dust particles to move.
1b. hence, they cannot get off the ground very high, but the air should be more dense at the lower 1 foot.
1foot in altitude will not change the air density significantly, and the martian dust storms can and will throw dust extremely high up in the atmosphere. Density might not be high, but velocity makes up for that. This is evidenced in that dust still collects on the rovers, its just that their panels are higher off the ground than previous landers, which allowed the winds that are faster that high off the ground to blow the dust off their panels. Basically the height of the rovers exceeds the boundary con
Re:Brings to mind... (Score:5, Informative)
They may have done it that way because it may not possible for their mission support software on the ground to handle two different versions of flight software on Mars.
In any event, NASA's flight software development process is extremely rigorous, up to and including an Independent Verification and Validation center in West Virginia which independently evaluates all NASA flight software (http://www.ivv.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]). It's not like it's a beta version of code being sent to the Rovers - the likelihood of finding a bug in the code that escaped testing was sufficiently low to justify uplinking to both rovers.
If anyone wants some light holiday reading, you can check out NASA's software engineering requirements at: http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?t=NPR&
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upgrading firmware over wireless? (Score:5, Funny)
Heh. (Score:3, Funny)
I attempted to explain to them that it was also the cause of most of the PCs now being frozen, something they were scratching their heads about, but they wouldn't listen, so I
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Forward error correction (Score:5, Insightful)
You made what appears to be an attempt at a joke:
Preventing checksum failure in high-latency communication isn't rocket science. You'd be surprised how many errors you can paper over by sending 50 percent more data [wikipedia.org].
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Have you ever tried installing an OS/program/game from something in the order of ten 3.5" disks?
I can't even recall the number of times I was stuck with some checksum error near the end while unpacking stuff. Glad we have USB sticks now!
No joke either, many wasted hours if added over the last two decades. =/
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Even if it was, it's NASA we are talking about!
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New capabilities? (Score:2, Funny)
A little too smart (Score:5, Funny)
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Their processors are PowerPC based RAD6000s [wikipedia.org]. They are capable of a whopping 35 MIPS, which is obviously woefully inadequate for any kind of sentience [wikipedia.org].
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Actually they were a bit more aggressive, saying, "All Your Base Are Belong To Us."
Trouble (Score:2)
"...and both rovers are now bricked."
Didn't the instruction manual say never to do updates over the wireless connection?
=P
NASA only wants a probe with great skills... (Score:4, Funny)
Nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills, and I'm pretty sure it can also catch a delicious bass...
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O/P (Score:2)
Anyone else read this and think of an RPG? I was half expecting to find the comments filled with demands of nerfing and buffing the new skills.
possibly the most most successful mission ever (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:possibly the most most successful mission ever (Score:4, Interesting)
Just one picture [imageshack.us] I cropped from one of their ridiculously large ~3000x4000 pixel photos for display on a 24" Widescreen LCD.
Why dont we send two more to the moon (Score:2)
that it gets cold/hot at the same time make it much more of a harsh environment.
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Let's put it simply and bluntly;
What these two rovers have accomplished in three years could be accomplished by a pair of field geologists in about three weeks. Robotic exploration isn't even in the same ballpark as human exploration.
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That's some upgrade! (Score:2)
four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers.
The rovers can fly now? That's some mighty good software!Unfortunately, (Score:2)
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IDKFA (Score:2)
Next week they're trying idspispopd and all those tricky hills and rocks will be child's play!
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Cheating! (Score:3, Funny)
I can tell you Blizzard wouldn't approve of this!
What's their power status? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do Martian dust at all collect on their panels or are e.g. winds / dust devils regularly wiping that off completely so it's simply no issue?
I heard about some wheel problem on one of the rovers; is there any other special serious problems they're at all seeing at this point?
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Welcome to the Intarweb! (Score:3, Insightful)
So why is it easier for you to post your question to /. instead of actually looking it up for yourself? It's not like it's gonna be a hard or obscure topic to quickly find answers to...
Are you AOL-time-traveler-from-'97 somehow unaware of nasa.gov, google.com, or wikipedia.org?
Do you so needy of attention you'll shamelessly ask others to spoonfeed your (presumably) adult self?
Or are you just one of those socially challenged boors who has to interject something, anything, into a thread no matter how inane
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the most intense firmware upgrade ever.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:the most intense firmware upgrade ever.. (Score:4, Interesting)
From my post [slashdot.org] in the viking 30th anniversary thread [slashdot.org].
Ah! Here's a reference from the RISKS digest Volume 3, Issue 60 - 1986. (A digest that is still running today, and is a highly insightful window into how technology screwups mess with daily life.)
Ground control lost contact with Viking 1, apparently due to a
software change transmitted to the lander that was accidentally
overlaid upon some mission-critical software already in the lander's
computer. (Bruce Smith, "JPL Tries to Revive Link with Viking 1",
@ux(Aviation Week and Space Technology), April 4, 1983, Volume
118(14), page 16.)
Christ, yeah! (Score:2)
Maybe just upgrading apps - not OS (Score:2)
It was all well and good till the upgrade. (Score:2)
Meanwhile, Opportunity is going to bitch that all the time it spent rock grinding was wasted because the geology skill track has been nerfed?
How long to build another rover? (Score:2)
old news (Score:2)
Mars rover OS... (Score:5, Informative)
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And as soon as SCO beats IBM, Novell, and AutoZone like bongo drums in court they're going after NASA. "All Your UNIX Are Belong To Us."
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Re:Obligatory comment (Score:4, Informative)
While I know you're making a joke, other people might be interested - they run VxWorks and the flight control software is written in Java. NASA are pretty fond of VxWorks - it pops up in lots of their projects
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BTW, is the VM open source? (:-p)
Re:Obligatory comment (Score:5, Interesting)
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I was wondering about this too, but I imagine (and sorely hope!) that they develop any space-related software using formal methods, which would probably discard any idea of development speed
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Speed and convenience aren't necessarily the same thing. Most space-related software is subject to much more thorough processes than this, however when your talking about small development utilities to aid the programmers in managing relatively minor parts of the development process, a quick GUI (or bash script) works
Re:Obligatory comment (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://www.arl.reading.ac.uk/ [reading.ac.uk]
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The Planetary Society successfully extracted audio from the Huygens probe to Saturn's moon Titan. [planetary.org]
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apt-get install mars-rover
I'm assuming that was done before launching it, now they just have to upgrade sources.list and then run:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Re:The new behaviors (Score:4, Funny)
Wrong planet. They should've sent them to Jupiter.
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It behooves [reference.com] you? Are you sure?