![]() A build-up of dust has meant the spacecraft's solar panels are no longer generating anywhere near enough power to keep the batteries charged. The InSight lander is in a precarious position regarding power. Pondering what services to switch off to keep your laptop going just that bit longer? NASA engineers can relate, having decided the Mars InSight lander will go out on a high: they plan to burn through the remaining power to keep the science flowing until the bitter end. The Martian moon is shaped like a potato, with an uneven, pockmarked surface unlike the Earth's round Moon. It also collected data that hinted at signs of methane, possibly forged in the hot furnace of volcanoes long ago.įinally, the spacecraft orbiter has provided astronomers with some of the most detailed images of Phobos. Mars Express was the first to spot signs of water ice and carbon dioxide ice on the planet, leading scientists to question whether it could have been habitable at some point. The spacecraft carries seven instruments, including various cameras, spectrometers, and a radar altimeter to study Mars's atmosphere, climate, and geology. It took almost two months only to set up and fully validate the development environment." ![]() Installing common things like a working web browser or a source code editor was difficult too. "Just finding a way to share files between host and guest machines was an hard task. I did this with a virtual machine in VirtualBox," he told The Register. "The very old development environment (it was quite old already back in year 2000) required to set up a Windows 98 machine. "Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!" "We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS," he said. Pushing new software to such an old orbiter after so long is challenging, according to Carlo Nenna, an engineer at Enginium, an Italian IT consulting firm helping to roll out the upgrade. Mars Express was ESA's first planetary mission, and is the second oldest active spacecraft orbiting a planet other than Earth. Australia down for scheduled maintenance: No talking to Voyager 2 for 11 months.Humanity uploaded an AI to Mars and lets it shoot rocks with lasers.Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence.Surviving eclipse season and resurrecting 25-year-old software with Windows for Workgroups 3.11: One year with Mars Express.I working on it every day since its launch, and I am sure that Mars Express will give us the possibility to make many other discoveries in the coming years that will help us to better understand our planet." "I am not surprised at all that such a mission is still in flight after 19 years. "The MARSIS radar on-board software upgrade demonstrates that it is possible to renew an entire mission," Cicchetti told The Register in a statement. Colin Wilson, a scientist working on the mission, said the software was "like having a brand-new instrument on board…almost 20 years after launch." Mars Express will thus continue to look for signs of water near the Martian South Pole at high resolutions.
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