Upgrading Software From 350 Million Miles Away 228
CWmike writes "Picture doing a remote software upgrade. Now picture doing it when the machine you're upgrading is a robotic rover sitting 350 million miles away, on the surface of Mars. That's what a team of programmers and engineers at NASA are dealing with as they get ready to download a new version of the flight software on the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed safely on the Red Planet earlier this week. 'We need to take a whole series of steps to make that software active. You have to imagine that if something goes wrong with this, it could be the last time you hear from the rover,' said Steve Scandore, a senior flight software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'It has to work,' he told Computerworld. 'You don't' want to be known as the guy doing the last activity on the rover before you lose contact.'"
Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
So what's their problem? Just tell a sysadmin [xkcd.com] to fix it.
Re:Failsafe (Score:3, Funny)
Thank you so much Mr. Wowsers for giving NASA this great idea. I suspect, given the genius of the thought, you will be contacted for employment shortly.
Re:Actually... only 157 million miles away (Score:5, Funny)
Forgot something and noticed halfway? Happens to me all the time...
Should have gone with Debian.. (Score:2, Funny)
sudo apt-get update mars
Re:Actually... only 157 million miles away (Score:5, Funny)
Good news everyone!
NASA will only have to wait half as long to find out if their software upgrade worked!
Re:Stop Calling Mars "The Red Planet"! (Score:1, Funny)
i spoke to mars and it assured me it wasn't offended
but it was happy for you to be offended on its behalf
Re:And NASA has made mistakes with this before... (Score:5, Funny)
99% of brickings are the result of people doing stuff that the manufacturer did not intend for you to do
In that case, that should happen with deep space probes quite a lot.
Re:Actually... only 157 million miles away (Score:3, Funny)
Curiosity made the Mars run in 1.82543347 × 10-5 Parsecs
Re:And NASA has made mistakes with this before... (Score:2, Funny)
pff worst case scenario : they send him over to mars to jtag the rover by hand...
virus protection (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And NASA has made mistakes with this before... (Score:5, Funny)
Similar to some devices here on Earth, the rover should have an automatic revert solution.
It does. Scientists put a small switch in at the back which you hold down while powering it up and it will reset itself.