Mars OS: no life on the red planet, but many bugs

In today's edition of Wired News, I interview Mars Rover mission chief software architect Glenn Reeves about the challenges of maintaining a functioning operating system on another planet — and what it's like to live life on Martian Standard Time.


WN: What are your biggest challenges right now in sorting out what went wrong with Spirit, and how you're going to fix its tech problems?

Reeves: We have to plan ahead very carefully what we're going to do during each window of opportunity. There are only about three "windows" in each day, and we need to be able to see Earth from Mars.
During one window, we're running a script on the vehicle to tell us which piece of software in the system is causing that reset problem. We've tried that for two days, but so far haven't been successful. In another, we're trying to dump parts of the 224-MB flash file system back down to Earth, so we can reconstruct the system here. But think about it — on a good day, we can only transmit less than 5 MB, so moving the whole file means a lot of days with no additional science. We'd prefer to avoid that path, but it's a contingency plan. In that third window, we try to communicate with the orbiter.

Since we can bring up the system in "cripple mode," we're doing integrity checks manually. But this takes a lot of time, because we like to do them one by one, in order. We can't waste any effort, or time. You could say our dialup service is really, really, really slow.

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