ESA’s Mars spacecraft will receive an upgrade to Windows 98 to increase its performance to improve its mission capabilities. Check the details.
Yes, you read that right. A spacecraft orbiting Mars will eventually receive a Windows 98 upgrade to increase its performance. Sounds weird, right? Many of you who read this now may be familiar with Windows 98. And that’s no problem, considering that this spacecraft was launched in 2003 and has been orbiting the red planet for almost 19 years. This is a long time and in the world of technology on planet Earth, this vessel would be considered obsolete. After all, how many computers do you still use Windows 98, or even Windows XP?
The spacecraft, called Mars Express, was launched in 2003 by the European Space Agency (ESA) and its software was based on Microsoft’s Windows 98. The spacecraft was carrying a team called Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphereic Sounding (MARSIS). . The team was key to the discovery of a huge underground liquid water aquifer in 2018. Now ESA wants to upgrade Theocrat to make it work even better.
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Mars Express to get the Windows 98 update
The MARSIS team basically uses low-frequency radio waves to study the surface of Mars in search of water, as well as its atmosphere. The spacecraft’s 130-foot-long antenna can search up to 3 miles below the planet’s surface. With the software update, the spacecraft should be able to improve signal reception and onboard data processing. This will improve the quality of the data that is sent to Earth.
“After decades of fruitful science and having acquired a good understanding of Mars, we wanted to push the instrument’s performance beyond some of the limitations required when the mission began,” says Andrea Cicchetti, deputy PI and director of operations from MARSIS to INAF, which he directed. the development of the update.
“We have faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS,” says Carlo Nenna, a software engineer aboard MARSIS at Enginium that implements the upgrade. “No less important because MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a Microsoft Windows 98-based development environment!”
“Previously, to study the most important features of Mars and to study its moon Phobos, we relied on a complex technique that stored a lot of high-resolution data and filled the instrument’s internal memory very quickly,” he says. Andrea. “By discarding the data we don’t need, the new software allows us to turn on MARSIS for five more times and explore a much larger area with each pass,” Andrea added.
With the new software up and running, Mars Express will accelerate the study of these regions in high resolution and confirm whether they are water sources on Mars. “It’s really like having a new instrument aboard Mars Express almost 20 years after launch,” adds Colin Wilson, an ESA Mars Express scientist.