[HN Gopher] Software upgrade for 19-year-old Martian water-spotter
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Software upgrade for 19-year-old Martian water-spotter
Author : zoomablemind
Score : 73 points
Date : 2022-06-29 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.esa.int)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.esa.int)
| Normille wrote:
| Jeeezus --how many fucking times!
|
| Does no-one _ever_ bother to check if an article has already been
| submitted, before mashing their damned keyboard!
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| ziddoap wrote:
| Can I ask why it makes you so upset? You can flag it and move
| on.
|
| I for one did not see the ones from a few days ago (they all
| seem to have 1-3 pts, probably never made it to the front), so
| I benefitted from the repost.
| toastedwedge wrote:
| I agree, with details: On occasion I end up seeing the
| reposts first because they're on the front page or second
| page rather than "the main one" with more upvotes and
| comments.
|
| Plus the timing. I might see the duplicate _after_ the first
| submission due to the time of day I check. I 'm just one
| person so YMMV.
| tomcam wrote:
| Hard day at the office, dear?
| xenon_type wrote:
| I wish they could add some detail on how the update is done. Is
| it similar to Bluetooth OTA DFU (over-the-air device firmware
| update)? Do they have a bootloader that takes care of that? Does
| it work like a traditional bootloader or do they take additional
| cautionary steps?
| milgrim wrote:
| The satellite probably has two processor modules. With A being
| active the software image for B gets uplinked via telecommands
| and then written to memory. Then the satellite is being
| rebooted using processor module B with the new software. If it
| does not work it will reboot again to A with the help of a
| watchdog. But if everything works, the software for processor
| module A can be updated then. Something like that I would
| suspect.
|
| Edit: disregard what I wrote, the article is about an update
| for the instrument and I thought it was about the satellite.
| But he Flight User Manual is available:
| https://archives.esac.esa.int/psa/ftp/MARS-EXPRESS/MARSIS/ME...
| zoomablemind wrote:
| > _"..."We faced a number of challenges to improve the
| performance of MARSIS," says Carlo Nenna, MARSIS on-board
| software engineer at Enginium, who is implementing the upgrade.
| "Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed
| over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on
| Microsoft Windows 98!" "_
|
| Not sure if this implies that there was an actual Win98 instance
| running on-board, or only some custom system/firmware which was
| developed under Win98...
|
| If they will be remotely installing a newer Windows version
| (which I doubt) on the Mars orbit, that must be added to the
| Guinness World Records!
|
| Ta-da!
| ptsneves wrote:
| Proprietary toolchains of that era are a special beast. They
| are probably talking about proprietary compilers and
| development tools, which were certified and depended in win98
| environments.
|
| Perhaps they just ran the toolchain in a win98 qemu instance
| and developed on a modern computer. That is what I would do and
| I am an embedded build system guy.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I take it to mean _only_ the development environment was
| Windows 98, otherwise they could just have said using Win98. It
| wouldn 't make any sense to put Win98 in MARSIS itself. Sending
| things into space isn't about how fast a solution can be made,
| it's about the robustness of what goes out.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yes, there's most definitely not anything on the probe that
| could even run Windows 98. ESA's article is pretty clear that
| it's just that the software was originally _developed_ on
| Win98, but of course the usual game of telephone happened and
| several websites have actually reported that the orbiter
| itself is running Win98...
| graycat wrote:
| If we, the US and/or EU, send humans to the moon and Mars, soon
| we will have humans, maybe a lot of humans, dead on the moon or
| Mars or floating in space, for maybe some thousands of years.
| Big, long term embarrassment. Not good.
|
| Thus, I strongly suggest we send no humans to the moon or Mars.
|
| And I strongly suggest we take this opportunity to do the
| research, engineering, and development of essentially robots to
| do what we would want humans to do on the moon or Mars. Then we
| will have _dead_ robots out there, but we won 't have to care so
| much.
|
| If China, Russia, India, etc. want to send humans to the moon or
| Mars, then they will have dead Chinese, Russians, Indians, etc.
| out there for thousands of years. Their long term embarrassment,
| not ours.
| Faaak wrote:
| How is having a dead citizen on Mars an embarrassment ? I'd
| have thought that it would be pride, even.
| graycat wrote:
| How? The person is, uh, did I mention, dead? Since our
| intention was not to send people out there to die, their
| death indicates a failure, and that is an embarrassment.
|
| If anyone is a little slow to see the embarrassment, then I'm
| sure the US MSM (mainstream media) would use the deaths as a
| grand source of shocking headlines to grab people by the
| heart and gut, have their eyeballs follow, and increase the
| ad revenue.
|
| If you like the idea of dying out there, sign up to be one of
| the first humans on Mars: Your chances of staying there for
| thousands of years are excellent. And, for your death, I
| doubt that will take very long, maybe less than 100 hours
| after you land. That is, for humans, the moon and Mars are
| dangerous places, wildly, outrageously dangerous.
|
| For a death on the moon or Mars, sending the body back to
| earth would be expensive. Leaving the body there and adding
| it to the growing collection of dead bodies will be for
| thousands of years a grand embarrassment. For a body in
| space, often retrieving it would be very expensive, so
| expensive that we are in line to have a large, growing
| collection of bodies out in space in whatever orbits around
| whatever masses.
|
| In a little more detail, out there, humans will suffer from
| high energy radiation, i.e., cosmic rays, and the effects of
| low gravity. Further, both the physical and social
| environments will be highly foreign and, thus, very likely
| harmful.
|
| Yes, soon one proposal will be to gather up the bodies on the
| moon or Mars, load them into a special rocket, and send them
| to the sun. That will be an expensive rocket and still do
| nothing about the bodies in orbits. Let the Chinese, etc.
| accumulate dead bodies. We in the US will have just dead
| robots, right, that can be used for spare parts!
|
| Soooooo, here in the US, just take this opportunity to
| research, engineer, and develop various robots.
|
| We can learn our lesson the easy way (just read what I am
| writing here) or the hard way. But one way or the other, we
| are in line to learn our lesson: (A) Sending robots into
| space is quite doable. (B) Due to the dangers and the really
| goofy environments, there is no role for humans in _deep_
| space now or anytime on the horizon. Sooooo, the humans build
| the robots and send the robots, not the humans.
|
| The easy way or the hard way, guys.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Following your argument to its logical conclusion, we
| should cease human activities on Earth too (otherwise,
| humans will die there - and we can't have that!).
| graycat wrote:
| Nope. Doesn't follow. Instead, we get to bury our dead,
| and they quickly decompose and can be forgotten about. In
| strong contrast, on the moon or Mars, burial would be
| wildly expensive, and the bodies would remain frozen and
| last for thousands of years. Shipping the bodies back to
| earth for burial or sending them to the sun, very
| expensive. In practice, we would just let the bodies pile
| up. That would be a massive embarrassment.
|
| Look, we're not in line to create societies with nice
| neighborhoods with couples, families, kids, etc. on the
| moon or Mars, in bubbles, tunnels, or anything. We're not
| in line to _colonize_ them. Instead, our interests that
| are at all feasible will be science or military. For the
| science, we don 't really want or need humans and their
| eyes, hands, or brains -- instead we need instruments,
| e.g., like we already have doing well on Mars. For what
| we can use from human eyes, hands, and brains, with some
| development, we can get that from robots. For the
| military, as we are now moving quickly just here on
| earth, even more so on the moon or Mars, we will want
| robots operating the rockets, weapons, etc. Besides,
| humans in the necessary bulky space suits are just not
| very effective at anything, not even just staying alive.
| abduhl wrote:
| Many bodies remain on or on the way to mountain summits
| like K2 and Everest. Retrieving them is prohibitively
| expensive. The conditions ensure that they will remain
| there in decomposed for centuries. Should we stop going
| into the mountains?
|
| It's not an embarrassment to try to achieve an amazing
| task and fail. The embarrassment is giving up because
| you're scared you'll be embarrassed.
| graycat wrote:
| > K2 and Everest
|
| Sport for a few people. Otherwise no gain.
|
| > amazing task
|
| The moon and Mars, all pain, no gain.
|
| There is no gain, utility, worthwhile accomplishment for
| humans in space except for just a few humans in low earth
| orbit.
|
| There is nothing "amazing" that we know how to do sending
| humans beyond low earth orbit: Yes, we can build the
| rockets and put people on them, but there is essentially
| nothing they can do out there. Instruments, robots, yes.
| Humans, no.
|
| The US had some men walking on the moon. While they were
| there, they accomplished next to nothing. In simple
| terms, the whole effort was a publicity stunt for US
| presidential politics. And, all these decades later, no
| human has returned -- there is a big reason for that,
| there is no reason for a human up there.
|
| A human needs a space suit, huge, so clumsy the human can
| do next to nothing productive. Else the human needs a
| big, complicated space ship (station, bubble, tunnel)
| where, again, there is not much they can do, amazing or
| otherwise. Gee, they could take a lot of PDF files along
| and read about literature, science, ..., whatever.
|
| What we want out there is instruments. If we need more,
| would want humans to do, we should just develop suitable
| robots. Otherwise what we want out there is military,
| where again there is no real utility for having humans
| there.
|
| Humans just have no real role out there. Sorry 'bout
| that. Robots? Yes. Humans? No. Simple.
|
| If we send humans, the main result will be collections of
| frozen dead bodies that will still be there 1000 years
| from now. That will be a big embarrassment, and all for
| no good reason.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| How familiar are you with the concept of 'cremation'?
| noselasd wrote:
| With that attitude, we'd all be sitting inside our houses and
| noone would do anything of interrest or importance.
| graycat wrote:
| > sitting inside our houses
|
| No, but the _attitude_ is staying inside the atmosphere of
| earth, usually on land, and at or close to sea level. That is
| what we evolved for, and we are effective there. Nearly
| anywhere else, we 're talking super big, thick, heavy, clumsy
| suits and, still, lots of just outrageous dangers.
|
| > anything of interrest or importance.
|
| Dying on the moon or Mars is not of much of either.
|
| Instead, for the moon or Mars, we can get a lot of
| _interesting_ and _important_ work from research,
| engineering, and construction of robots able to do real work
| on the moon or Mars.
|
| For more work that is "interesting", and maybe "important",
| I'm busy at it everyday, without considering the moon or
| Mars.
|
| Actually, so far we've done pretty well with robots on Mars.
| For our next effort, we need a way to clean dust off the
| solar panels.
|
| Our robots have given us some really good data on the sun,
| Mercury and Venus, Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and its
| rings, each of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and now the
| _boundary_ between our solar system and deeper space.
|
| The Japanese have done well with _robots_ getting samples
| from some asteroids -- with some interesting data, e.g.,
| where at least some of the amino acids could have come from.
|
| For something really interesting out there, how 'bout the
| results from a really big gravitational wave telescope?
|
| For humans? I'm just fine, close to sea level, on land, in a
| house, with an Internet connection, just fine right here,
| thank you. You are welcome to my slot on any rocket to the
| moon or Mars, very welcome!
| bee_rider wrote:
| We have a ton of dead humans in the ocean, it isn't considered
| a national embarrassment, I don't think. Accidents are sad, but
| their inevitability is something that everyone understands.
|
| I don't think we should colonize Mars, at least given what
| we've seen there. Currently, it appears to be a big, empty,
| inhospitable, far away rock. Getting there and then
| terraforming it would, I guess, require figuring out how to
| live in space long term, at which point why bother going down
| the gravity well? Once we've figured out how to live in
| space... there's plenty of space in space, just stay in orbit
| (maybe we'll have expensive tourism on planets).
| graycat wrote:
| > We have a ton of dead humans in the ocean, it isn't
| considered a national embarrassment, I don't think. Accidents
| are sad, but their inevitability is something that everyone
| understands.
|
| In practice, on the moon or Mars, the dead bodies would just
| pile up. And otherwise there would be a lot of them in long
| lasting orbits. Here on earth, we don't have that problem.
| E.g., using _side scan sonar_ , we just found a US destroyer
| 3+ miles down, in two pieces, sunk by a shot from the
| battleship Yamato in one of the WWII battles in the
| Philippine Sea. We are not bothered by the pile up of the
| bodies of the dead US sailors. The bodies decompose and don't
| pile up, and in the case of the ocean are miles deep where it
| is pitch black, just above freezing, with not much in life.
|
| In my original post, I didn't object to the deaths. Instead I
| objected to the accumulation of dead bodies that will last
| for thousands of years.
|
| There is no reasonably feasible way for humans to colonize
| either the moon or Mars. Big problems include the medical
| effects of high energy cosmic rays and the low gravity. Other
| dangers stand to be the highly foreign, restrictive,
| threatening, and hostile environments, even nearly the best
| environments we could hope to create. Even if we could get
| some plants to be healthy on the moon or Mars, we can't get
| humans healthy there. No practical way. So, we will get piles
| of dead bodies, and all for nothing -- the moon and Mars are
| so hostile to humans that there is no way humans could be at
| all productive on either. Robots? Fine. Humans? No reasonably
| feasible way, and with a result of piles of dead bodies.
| Sorry 'bout that. It's not at all complicated.
| kabdib wrote:
| People die all the time. It's a natural and (we are pretty
| sure) unavoidable side-effect of living.
|
| It might be awkward and untidy, but so is pooping. The universe
| makes no value judgements. It's not embarrassing, it's life.
|
| If I went to Mars and died, meh, no big deal. Sorry about the
| mess. Feel free to recycle me any way you want, I certainly
| won't care.
|
| I've read some science fiction where they deal with "bodies in
| spaaaace" by recycling them in a garden, specifically for human
| corpses. If you've got a colony in an environment with limited
| biomass, you probably want to hold onto everything organic. At
| least your remains can help make oxygen and pretty flowers for
| the still living.
| graycat wrote:
| > Feel free to recycle me any way you want, I certainly won't
| care.
|
| In practice, you won't be _recycled_. Instead you will be
| frozen and just piled up or left in some orbit. Uh, it 's
| cold out there.
|
| And to supply the energy for such recycling, sounds like some
| human colonization out there. Sorry, there won't be any such
| colonization. The health effects on humans of high energy
| cosmic rays and low gravity mean that colonization out there
| is just not reasonable, in realistic terms, colonization is
| just not possible.
|
| Some instruments and robots can be productive beyond low
| earth orbit. There's no reasonably feasible way humans can.
| In practice, the result of efforts to send humans beyond low
| earth orbit will be no gains and some collections of frozen
| dead bodies that will remain frozen for thousands of years.
| Bummer. Embarrassing.
| kabdib wrote:
| I agree with most of that. Charles Stross has a great essay
| on why space travel is _horrible_ , and that robots are
| far, far better choices for almost any kind of mission.
| Hauling people around the universe is expensive, they're so
| fragile and needy. I mean, just look at the infrastructure
| it takes to keep them _breathing_.
|
| The SF novel I was thinking of was Niven and Pournelle's
| _Footfall_ , where industrious aliens have solved all the
| hard problems of living for long periods in space,
| including keeping the lights on, getting rid of waste heat,
| and maintaining a stable ecosystem. They incorporate their
| dead into a ceremonial garden where they grow flowers or
| something. It is all very, very sketchy in practice, of
| course. Kim Stanley Robinson has a more realistic take in
| his book _Aurora_ (and it 's depressing, one of the few
| books of his I have no intention of re-reading).
|
| But I still don't think dead people in space are
| embarrassing. Or if they are, that it's a big deal. It's
| more of a problem with litter, like the tourists currently
| cluttering up the slopes of Mt Everest.
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