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NASA Software Science

Curiosity Mars Rover Gets 50% Speed Boost From Software Update (newscientist.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
The navigation strategy of NASA's Curiosity rover means it has to stop frequently to check its position, but soon a software update will allow it to move almost continuously. From a report: A new software update will soon give NASA's Curiosity Mars rover a 50 per cent speed boost, allowing it to cover a greater distance and complete more science. But the update very nearly didn't happen because of a mysterious bug in the software that eluded engineers for years. Curiosity, which landed on Mars 10 years ago this month, has already greatly outlived its planned two-year lifespan.
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Curiosity Mars Rover Gets 50% Speed Boost From Software Update More

Curiosity Mars Rover Gets 50% Speed Boost From Software Update

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  • paywalled (Score:2, Informative)

    by Klaxton ( 609696 )

    Sounds like it would have been an interesting article to read.

  • Paywalled (Score:3)

    by mrwireless ( 1056688 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:02AM (#62796867)

    The link is paywalled.

    Curiously I couldn't find a mention on the rover's blog:
    https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/miss... [nasa.gov]

    Also no mention of this in the Nasa press release from two days ago.
    https://mars.nasa.gov/news/924... [nasa.gov]

  • Full article in cache (Score:5, Informative)

    by beernutz ( 16190 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:05AM (#62796881) Homepage Journal
    http://webcache.googleusercont... [googleusercontent.com]
  • He has this thing for mars, and he is big in to OTA update of vehicles changing fundamental things like brake calibration and range.

    • Re:It must be Elon. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:48AM (#62797041)

      Cars have been greatly computer controlled for decades. With a lot of changes to the cars features and ability usually required a software/firmware updates. What was somewhat popular with some older car, is you would replace a few chips on the computer and you can get better performance, or better fuel economy.

      Over the Air updates, biggest improvement isn't all the cool new things that a software fix can do to a car, but the fact that the Car Maker can push it out, often fixing what would have been costly recalls to a rather cheap fix, (much cheaper than bringing it to the dealer to do a firmware upgrade) and giving you car the ability to stay mostly caught up with the times. Making sure there is a higher resale value of the car, as well allowing people to keep the car for longer. (while that may seem like bad news for a car company would would love to sell you a new car every week, in current conditions where there is so many people trying to get a new car, making sure that people don't have a reason to trade and get a different brand car is its own advantage)

      • Or rather, OTA updates that I can't refuse scare me.

        I'm fine with my dealer sending me a recall-notice postcard saying "open the fuse box, press the 'request update' button, verify that the number [an identifier for the specific patch] appears on the display, press the 'accept update' button."

        The idea being that unless the request update button has been pressed very recently, it is impossible to modify the firmware, AND that if the requested update doesn't match what is on the postcard, I can/should refuse

    • Well, if Elon wants to prove the safety of autonomous driving, he should build a Tesla rover, not a Tesla spacecraft [wikipedia.org]. Anything that can travel at a hiker's continuous pace would be impressive. The only "cheating" that would be allowed is some map data, produced by an orbiter, that avoids highly uneven terrain and possible dust traps.

  • That's quite impressive (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:12AM (#62796911)

    At this point I'm already amazed that the thing is still moving at all, not to mention that it gets faster as it ages.

    • Re:That's quite impressive (Score:5, Funny)

      by GoTeam ( 5042081 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:21AM (#62796935)
      I think they finally took the advice from IT crowd and tried turning it off, then on again. :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      It turns out that - barring major dust storms - Mars is a relatively benign enviroment for well built machinary and electronics. Humans , not so much.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by RobinH ( 124750 )
      Yeah, if Apple were doing the software updates, you know it'd only get slower and slower.

    • Re:That's quite impressive (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:59AM (#62797105)

      Well I expect the engineers under promised and over delivered. If they said that this was designed for a 10 year mission, and it lasted for 6 years, politically heads will roll, investigations politicians yelling about wasting tax payer money.... Vs designing it for the same 10 year mission but only selling it (for the same price) for a 2 year mission, then if it did fail in 6 years then they would still be given a pat on the back on how good of an engineer they are.

       

      • Like a German comedian spoofed Star Trek:

        "Scotty, how long will the repair take?"
        "It no good cap'n, will take 10 hours!"
        "Scotty, you got 5"
        "Ok, gonna git it done in 2"

        • Scotty is emblematic of the engineer who manages expectations. If he thinks it will take five hours, but says it will take ten, then he's given himself a helluva window in the event that five hours is insufficient. Heck, it was basically Scotty and his team that allowed the Enterprise to be battle worthy against the Reliant, and all because he under promises and over delivers.

          • At a time when the company really needed to be more predictable, as in delivering product exact when promised, the VP told us to double all our time estimates. One guy really took that seriously, even when I said "our boss is going to double your numbers anyway" he ignored it. And then another layer doubled estimates too. And the planning spreadsheet had built in slop as well. Ultimately it did help, because there's time finally being put in for proper planning, getting detailed requirements, doing prope

        • "Scotty, how long will the repair take?"
          "It no good cap'n, will take 10 hours!" ...snip

          You know it was deliberately written that way in the scripts, right?

          They probably made the exact same jokes while they were writing them.

      • If it was a commercial company, then everyone involved in the project would be gone 2 years after delivery and the new people would say "I wasn't us, I don't see why you're so mad, you should just buy our new improved version that has Cloud subscriptions!"

    • They are incredible technical feats. I'd hate to be the programming team having to do the update. "What do you mean it froze when we flashed the BIOS?" I know there's a lot of redundancy and safe modes, but I used to stress out enough doing BIOS-level updates when the damned computer was right in front of me. I don't think I'd have the balls to do it when the computer is 300 million miles away.

      • I used to stress out enough doing BIOS-level updates when the damned computer was right in front of me. I don't think I'd have the balls to do it when the computer is 300 million miles away.

        You PC doesn't have an automatic BIOS recovery watchdog.

        I'm sure the mars rover will have one.

      • They are incredible technical feats. I'd hate to be the programming team having to do the update. "What do you mean it froze when we flashed the BIOS?"

        ... which is why the rover management team has flight-duplicates of all the hardware (and software) in a workshop in ... Pasadena, isn't it? (Somewhere in America any way.) They may have difficulty zapping a particular cell in the RAM (or EEPROM) with a cosmic ray, but they should be able to map one out in the same way as the remote version.

        That's the differ

  • (...trolling for pedants by chumming the waters)

    I don't think you mean speed. I think you mean duty cycle.

  • The Rover found a tuning workshop on Mars!
    Cool.

  • Why so complicated... (Score:3, Funny)

    by imcdona ( 806563 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:53AM (#62797079)
    They spent ten years working out a complicated bug involving wheel rotations when they could have simply used GPS. ;)

    • You know, I was idly speculating about this - given the continued interest in (and missions on) Mars, I wonder how many satellites it would take to provide an acceptable level of GPS-like service for the Red Planet?

  • Should have crowd sourced (Score:3)

    by shibbie ( 619359 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @11:28AM (#62797231)
    There's no real reason why they couldn't have just made the source and simulator available and asked for people's help finding it. A small bug bounty would have also helped. If they are still using Java, they probably had a race condition or an esoteric error like using the common forkjoin pool and causing a lockup when it's exhausted (not many regular java devs are aware of the consequences of this for example). Regardless of fault, more eyes would have caught it sooner.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Maybe they felt publishing it would invite riff-raff and hackers.

    • Aerospace companies tend to use Ada, AFAIK. In this case, though, the rover is running C [vdocuments.mx]

    • If they are still using Java, they probably had a race condition or...

      If they are STILL USING JAVA? Have they EVER used Java? A "race condition", right, that turtle of a language probably won't permit that, as it's carefully designed to prevent you from doing anything.

      Let's just hope they were using something more sensible, like BASICA or GWBASIC, if they were going to use LANGUAGES SUITABLE FOR SMALL CHILDREN. Logo? Pilot?

      The "?SN ERROR" out front should have told you.

    • There's no real reason why they couldn't have just made the source and simulator available and asked for people's help finding it.

      A few reasons. ITAR/EAR restrictions. It's running on VxWorks, on a RAD750. Can't quite go down to the local big box store to pick up one of those.

      • That's a PowerPC arch, which has been emulated for some time. If the devs can run simulations without the space hardened tech I can't see how this would be too far off - unless they don't have an efficient workflow or mocking proprietary hardware parts.

    • There's no real reason why they couldn't have just made the source and simulator available and asked for people's help finding it.

      Yeah, let's reveal the protocol and have random people sending commands to the mars rover from their back yards.

  • Coming soon, a self-driving taxi service from NASA on Mars. Get the app today and be ready.

  • Curiosity has got plenty of its nine lives left.

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