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(I-SoftwareNews.Com, August 20, 2012 ) San Francisco, CA -- You may think that keeping your software for your phone, computer, or other electronic device is tough, but it’s nothing compared to the recent patch NASA performed on the Mars rover called Curiosity.
On Tuesday August 14 2012, NASA’s team from the Mars Science Laboratory successfully completed a total overhaul of Curiosity’s software. When asked why the patch was necessary so soon after launch, the chief software engineer for Curiosity (Ben Cichy) replied that the software necessary for landing and the software necessary for exploring Mars aren’t necessarily the same. In addition, Curiosity’s hardware is pretty modest and it didn’t have enough memory for both types of software at the same time. The landing software was swapped out remotely and replaced with the exploration and roving software.
The full process of swapping out the software took four days. The team was extremely careful throughout the process, because they didn’t want to ‘brick’ the rover. If they had ‘bricked’ the rover, it would have stopped communicating with them at all. They were very methodical in swapping out one set of software for the other set of software.
Curiosity is best at exploring during the day when there’s adequate light. At night, the rover is in a low-power state that Cichy compares to the hibernation mode used by laptop computers. During this low-power state, the onboard nuclear power station (also known as an radioisotope thermoelectric generator) recharges Curiosity’s batteries so that it will be ready to resume exploring in the morning. Curiosity’s heaters remain on during its nightly hibernation as does the system that wakes the rover up each morning (this system also reboots Curiosity’s computers).
During the first day of the software update, NASA uploaded a temporary version of the software to Curiosity’s primary computer. This software was held in RAM (Random Access Memory) so that the computer would revert back to the previous version when it was restarted. The reversion gave the team a chance to ensure that everything was functioning correctly.
The process on the second day included deploying a more permanent version of the software to the file system. On the third day, the temporary version was uploaded to Curiosity’s backup computer, and on the fourth day the permanent version was uploaded to the backup computer.
The reason it took so long is that every action takes about 30 minutes to complete. First it takes 14 minutes to send a signal to the rover, and then its another 14 minutes for the rover to respond to the signal. It only took a few minutes to install each version of the software, but it was a very slow process to actually reach the point of installation.
It all came together successfully in the end; there were no glitches. You probably wish that updating your electronic devices was as painless, but then again it doesn’t take four days to update them either!
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David Josh Oliver
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Source: EmailWire.Com 
Source: EmailWire.com
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