The European Space Agency (ESA) has updated the software of a critical part of the Mars Express spacecraft for the first time since it was located on the Red Planet in 2003.
ESA says (Opens in new window) that the Mars Advanced Radar Instrument for Underground and Ionospheric Drilling (MARSIS) “gets a major software upgrade that will allow it to see beneath the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in more detail than ever.” And this is no small feat.
“We have faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS,” said Carlo Nena of Enginium in a statement. “Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed more than 20 years ago using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!”
But Enginium and the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, which runs MARSIS, have overcome these challenges. ESA says it is now deploying Mars Express’s updated MARSIS software to help it look for signs of liquid water deep below the planet’s surface.
“The new software will help us explore these high-resolution regions more quickly and in-depth and confirm whether they are home to new sources of water on Mars,” ESA Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson said in a statement. “It’s really like having a brand new instrument on board the Mars Express almost 20 years after launch.
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All this means that new software is being implemented on a nearly 20-year-old tool that was originally developed under Windows 98, on a planet that is typically about 140 million miles away. Keep this in mind the next time you’re prompted to install an update for your device.
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