Picture doing a remote software upgrade. Now picture doing it
when the machine you're upgrading is a robotic rover sitting 350
million miles away, on the surface of Mars. That's what a team
of programmers and engineers at NASA are dealing with as they
get ready to download a new version of the flight software on
the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed safely on the Red Planet
earlier this week. "We need to take a whole series of steps to
make that software active," said Steve Scandore, a senior flight
software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "You have
to imagine that if something goes wrong with this, it could be
the last time you hear from the rover." "It has to work," he
told Computerworld. "You don't' want to be known as the guy
doing the last activity on the rover before you lose contact."
This photo is part of the first full-color 360-degree image
taken by Curiosity at the Gale Crater landing site. (Image:
NASA) Michael Watkins, a mission systems manager at JPL, said
during a press conferenc