

Mars Rover Curiosity Survives 'Brain Surgery,' Set for 1st Drive  - CWuestefeld
http://www.space.com/17104-mars-rover-curiosity-brain-surgery-driving.html

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mkoryak
I initially thought that the upgrade was needed because they released a new
version as the rover was en-route to mars. That would make sense, but the
article says that the upgrade was made to switch the rover from landing mode
to driving mode. Why wouldn't they just send a 256mb flash drive along with
that 2M pixel camera to upgrade the rover when it got there?

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sausagefeet
My guess is weight + money. Not sure how much a space hardened flash costs. On
top of that could be complexity costs.

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ralfd
Not quite. The reason is that the specs of the mission were frozen 2004.

[http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/08/08/Curiosity-
interview-...](http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/08/08/Curiosity-interview-
with-Malin-Space-Science-Systems-Mike-Ravine)

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CodeCube
most of the comments on that page are reprehensible

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eblume
The page /itself/ is reprehensible. The amount of ads I had to close to read
the article...

Does anyone have an article on the subject that isn't pointing to such an
awful site?

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T-hawk
Yah. The Internet is a horrible place when space.com has to resort to "One
weird trick" ads.

Found this via news.google.com, which is also not great but slightly less
tragic:

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230151/NASA_upgrades...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230151/NASA_upgrades_Mars_Curiosity_software_..._from_350M_miles_away)

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DanielBMarkham
It's interesting to put this in technology we all know.

So it takes them four days to release?

Not bad, considering the ftp is over 40 million miles and at 160 bps. Too bad
they couldn't set up a CI server.

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jgrahamc
I know you were being funny, but the actual details of the upgrade are
interesting. The actual software was uploaded to Curiosity during the flight
to Mars and has been stored in the rover. During the cruise to Mars both the
flight software for the cruise stage and EDL were upgraded and the software in
the rover. The code that's going to be executed is now being taken out of
storage and made into the main program overwriting the EDL software that's no
longer needed.

<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-168>

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DanielBMarkham
I think the purpose was less a joke and more along the lines of an extended
metaphor. I agree that it is very interesting. I was hoping for somebody to
make just the comment you did. Thanks.

But the question was meant to really spawn a general discussion around
software release in general in a deep space environment. So anybody know how
the next upgrade would take place, assuming Curiosity needs one? Would it be
staged on the Mars Orbiter first? Relayed a frame at a time? Do the concepts
of CI apply in deep space deployments? Why or why not?

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nissimk
This is a very exciting story about repairing a software issue on the Mars
Spirit rover in 2004:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110719212649/http://www.planeta...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110719212649/http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000702/)

Shorter wikipedia version:

[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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AllTheThings
Am I the only one visualizing a Lisp REPL into the rover right now?

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ballooney
No- some JPL engineers have thought of it too!

Here's an interesting history of Lisp as flight software at JPL:

<http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html>

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level09
The more I hear about and see pictures of this "Curiosity Rover" the more I
start to think it is just one big hoax, how can one really find out if this
isn't really fake ?

the images look really "earthy" to me and it looks very similar to what they
did with the "Moon Landing" and "Voyager Recording"

I'm not an expert but perhaps some expert can give us some insights on this ?

