Software Upgrade At 655 Million Kilometers 57
An anonymous reader writes "The Rosetta probe was launched in 2004 with a mission that required incredible planning and precision: land on a comet. After a decade in space, the probe woke from hibernation in January. Now, Rosetta has spotted its target. 'Rosetta is currently around 5 million kilometers from the comet, and at this distance it is still too far away to resolve – its light is seen in less than a pixel and required a series of 60–300 second exposures taken with the wide-angle and narrow-angle camera. The data then traveled 37 minutes through space to reach Earth, with the download taking about an hour per image.' Now it's time to upgrade the probe's software. Since it's currently 655,000,000 kilometers from Earth, the operation needs to be flawless. 'When MIDAS is first powered up, it boots into "kernel mode" – the kernel manages a very robust set of basic operations for communicating with the spacecraft and the ground and for managing the more complex main program. From kernel mode we can upload patches to the main software, verify the current contents, or even load an entirely new version.' The Rosetta blog is continually being updated with progress on the mission, and the Planetary Society has more information as well. The probe will arrive at the comet in August, and will attempt landing in November."
Re:Remember when.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit - or selective memory.
Back in the days, you bought a bunch of floppies, installed the software, and then spent years putting up with a lot of annoying bugs that required buying the next version of the software if you wanted to get rid of them. If they had fixed them, maybe.
Updating is great: if you have a slightly shitty piece of software, you stand a fair chance of getting corrections for free. The only annoying thing is when something that works great stops working great because the developer had a brainwave and decided to come up with Something Even Greater[tm] that turns out to suck. But then, you get that for free too, while before, again, you had to pay for the next version of the software to discover the sucky new feature that replaced the useful one.
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The only annoying thing is when something that works great stops working great because the developer had a brainwave and decided to come up with Something Even Greater[tm] that turns out to suck.
Ah! You use Gnome too, I see.
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Well written software that works so well you don't want to update are few and far between. It's not even laziness by the developers, it's just that all pieces of software have flaws, however hard the developers try to produce quality code. That's just the nature of software.
If you have such a piece of software, well... don't update.
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Sounds like you made poor choices in the software you were using.
Re:Remember when.... (Score:4, Interesting)
To be fair, many probes have done this type of thing.
The Voyager probes had software updates regularly in their prime, and it frequently made news back in the day. When approaching a planet or interesting object they would upload imaging software, when finished they would upload different sensor programs. About a decade ago (2003?) there were news stories about how they reprogrammed one of the probes to help detect the crossover to deep space.
It is certainly interesting and poses some risk of breaking the probe, but it is standard procedure and something the probes are designed for.
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yes, it totally blows having a full-duplex terminal session.
the first thing to do... (Score:3)
is to load TWRP so the can finally root the damn thing.
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According to TFA they have a kernel exploit and will attempt to install a CFW.
In the mean time, forget about torrenting Churyumov.-.Gerasimenko.(2014).CAM.x264-Rosetta.avi as it's VERY blurry and sound is missing.
Re: the first thing to do... (Score:1)
Has Verizon verified that the update won't mess with their LTE network?
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The developers decided it would be cheaper to get version 1.01 launched and then rely bug reports from the space aliens for upgrades
Re:Lauched with defects? (Score:4, Insightful)
The software obviously wasn't ready when the probe launched. They needed nine more years to develop it. Had they waited, the probe wouldn't be near the comet in time. So it's a rather smart decision.
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So they hired CGI to write the software?
Re:Lauched with defects? (Score:4, Informative)
Rosetta has the Osiris CCD camera onboard, which can take 4 megapixel images (2k x 2k). Unfortunately, the data transfer speed is at best 1K/second, which is going back to the days of 14K modems. Since it's been a decade between the time that the satellite was launched in 2004, and the present day, huge advances in image compression size have taken place. So the researchers will want to upgrade all the compression algorithms. Think how much web browsers have improved in a decade.
http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/ho... [umd.edu]
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Excuse my ignorance but I'm curious about these "huge" advances in compression technology. Can you give an example of a particular compression algorithm that hasn't been around in 2004 and is much better than the most commonly used formats (i.e. jpeg) ?
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H.265? "H.265 is said to double the data compression ratio compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC at the same level of video quality"
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Yes, but H.265 is a video compression format. I dont't think they are going to take videos with the OSIRIS camera (or any of the other instruments) nor transmit video data back to earth.
Anyway, after some googling one finds that the most advanced image compression formats are based on some form of wavelet transform.
Examples would be JPEG 2000, JPEG LS and ICER. All of them predate 2004 but have seen some improvement over the last years. ICER was used on the mars exploration rovers, so it could be they use s
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Yes, compression doesn't seem to be the likely reason, I'd look for other ones. But I'd be careful about using any publicly available comparisons of compression methods in this case, because it does not matter which one is better on average. The scientists know what to expect, how the image is likely to look, etc. They'd choose the best algorithm for this specific use case, and that might very well be a different one than for FB selfies... Not that I expect a huge difference anyway.
Re:IP? (Score:5, Informative)
127.0.0.1
Hack away my friend...
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Hmm, that seems to be in the same network (127.0.0.1/8) as the Rosetta probe, so I assume the IP is some important server in the ESA network. I'm launching my hack toolkit there right now...aahhahhhahh
NO CARRIER
Punch card stacks, anyone? (Score:3)
Since it's currently 655,000,000 kilometers from Earth, the operation needs to be flawless
Well, *that* is the real reason why they taught all those students to program on punch cards and have their batch jobs run on Saturday nights with cheap CPU time. It was to prepare those students to program spacecrafts far, far away...
more like this plz (Score:1)
Remember to unclick the box . . . ! (Score:5, Funny)
. . . otherwise, the probe will be filled with a bunch of unwanted McAfee bloatware!
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. . . otherwise, the probe will be filled with a bunch of unwanted McAfee bloatware!
Beware of the Rosetta Rickrole [youtube.com]!
Updating at interplanetary distances is easy... (Score:2)
Compared to updating a desktop Windows box while some clueless biddy is clicking away on your installer at random ("Yes! I definitely want the Cryptolocker browser toolbar" "It hasn't done anything for five minutes! Should I unplug it and call great-grandson Justin on his text thingie?" "Yes, let's have Windows Live control my Hotmail").
I would be too paranoid (Score:5, Insightful)
655,000,000 kilometres = 655 gigametres (Score:2)
I know nothing of these "software upgrades" of which they speak.
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I'd be paranoid too; if anything goes wrong, they'll have turned the Rosetta into a stone.
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Best Slashdot summary ever. (Score:5, Informative)
Period.
It's always a hand-wringing operation (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to be sure (Score:1)
Upgrade fails. (Score:2)
Years later they retrieve the machine, hook up a KVM. What they see is - Suspected corrupted filesystem. FSCK, Please type in root's password to proceed.
The 'Doh! could be heard across the country.
Reason for upgrade (Score:1)