
NASA Curiosity Mars Rover Will Spend First Weekend Installing New Software - llambda
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20120810.html
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iuguy
"Updating your rover is almost complete. You must restart your rover for the
updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your rover now?”

Am I the only one having a very nervous moment when the update's applied?

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riledhel
Previous missions had problems with that one
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_rover#Sol_18_.28January_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_rover#Sol_18_.28January_21.2C_2004.29_flash_memory_management_anomaly)

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EternalFury
Amusing, considering I was bashed last night with repeated "you can't patch it
once it's on Mars".

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zerohp
Voyager 2 was at the edge of the solar system when JPL diagnosed and corrected
a single bit error that caused it to return garbage data.

<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-151>

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EternalFury
That is beyond amazing.

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SeanDav
I am fairly amazed that they need to do this because of what looks like space
constraints. I wouldn't have thought that programming code would take
significant space and the potential for screw ups just seems way too high to
my mind.

I hope they get it right...

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mburns
Not to be rude, but it sounds like you're just unfamiliar with standard
procedure.

"We designed the mission from the start to be able to upgrade the software as
needed for different phases of the mission,"

>I wouldn't have thought that programming code would take significant space

It doesn't. I bet it takes just as much space as you imagine it does. The
rover just have _that little_ space to work with. These aren't last year's FPS
gaming rigs with hundreds of gigs on SSD available. These are hardened, turn-
of-the-millennium embedded computers.

>the potential for screw ups just seems way too high

Both Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft have been sent software updates, without
fault. MSL was designed from the get-go to have software updates mid-mission.

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jessriedel
> Both Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft have been sent software updates, without
> fault. MSL was designed from the get-go to have software updates mid-
> mission.

OK, but the Viking 1 lander on Mars was lost due to human error during a
software update.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program#Mission_end>

That's not to say software updates don't make sense, but you can't just
justify them with "MSL was designed to do it and it's been done successfully
before." Rather, you have to weigh the benefits and risk as usual. Luckily, I
have confidence this was carefully though about and that the right decision
has been made.

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rowborg
I find the idea of a bricked Curiosity horribly depressing. Let's make sure to
wait a FULL FIVE MINUTES before rebooting, ok guys?

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powerslave12r
Or 14.

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robertskmiles
I was wondering what kind of security they have on the upgrade system.
Presumably the software packages are signed. No hacker on Earth wouldn't like
to be able to say they'd cracked a system on Mars.

But then I thought, "Who actually has the hardware to broadcast to Mars in the
first place?".

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vladd
See the discussion in this other thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4368242>

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riledhel
I've never realized there was a .org domain before. Thought something weird
happened because I was logged in this site and when I tried to vote in your
link I couldn't!

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calciphus
Looks like an example of progeny mimicking creator.

"You're someplace you've never been, seeing and experiencing things almost no
one else gets to, and you spend your weekend fiddling with computers."

That's OK. We have all done it, and hopefully the outcome will be slightly
better than "Crap, I hosed up my RAID array and now this random obscure OS
build I installed is completely broken."

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CWIZO
Is the new software already on curiosity and it just needs to be installed or
are they transmitting the new software from earth?

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agildehaus
The update was transferred to the rover during the cruise stage.

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DrCatbox
Am I the only one thats afraid of a fuckup happening and the rover becoming
bricked before it actually moved!?

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HeyLaughingBoy
I'm _fairly_ sure that completely separating system boot functionality and
software reprogramming functionality was one of the first requirements of the
rover software update subsystem!

Sticking the bootloader in a ROM is a fairly secure way to accomplish this.

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maratd
Scary! What if they brick it?

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hartror
There is plenty of redundancy to deal with this sort of thing and they've done
lots of on the fly updating of various robot probes including on 40y/o Voyager
2 which had a flipped bit in its memory.

