NASA Engineers Prep for a Software Upgrade on Mars.

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

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Talk about your Remote Desktop Connections: NASA is preparing to upgrade the landing software on the Curiosity Rover to operational software designed to move the rover around Mars.

The new software, which is designed to help the rover get around Mars, whereas the old software was designed for the landing process, was sent to the rover while it was flying through space en route to Mars
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Parmenides said:
but not enough room for both?
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Yeah that was what I was thinking. This was launched last fall or so, so it's not like it's been traveling in space for years. Is it really easier to upload new software across space from earth than put a bit of extra flash onboard and have it there from the start?

That being said these guys obviously do know what they are doing, so I'm sure there is a reason.
 
So what is the Martian Rover equivalent of Crtl-Alt-Delete?
 
GotNoRice said:
Yeah that was what I was thinking. This was launched last fall or so, so it's not like it's been traveling in space for years. Is it really easier to upload new software across space from earth than put a bit of extra flash onboard and have it there from the start?

That being said these guys obviously do know what they are doing, so I'm sure there is a reason.
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I believe it's to do with the potential degradation of the storage while en route to Mars, the radiation out there can do horrible things to flash memory. As a result the capacity is pretty limited and extremely shielded.
 
Kor said:
I believe it's to do with the potential degradation of the storage while en route to Mars, the radiation out there can do horrible things to flash memory. As a result the capacity is pretty limited and extremely shielded.
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And remember that rover was launch and spec/built years ago...and even when spec'd and built they used old and tried tech. Hubble is using 486 hardware for example....and the 586 was an "upgrade" sent up in 1999 IIRC.
 
Remember they bricked one of the Viking landers by upgrading the software...the new software instructed it to lower it's antenna making the lander useless as they could no longer communicate.
 
GotNoRice said:
Yeah that was what I was thinking. This was launched last fall or so, so it's not like it's been traveling in space for years. Is it really easier to upload new software across space from earth than put a bit of extra flash onboard and have it there from the start?

That being said these guys obviously do know what they are doing, so I'm sure there is a reason.
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When was the last time you had a brand new machine go 9 months without a driver or bios update?
The ground exploration software probably wasn't even finished when this thing launched. They knew they were going to have 9 months while this thing was sailing unpowered to Mars...
 
Kueller said:
When was the last time you had a brand new machine go 9 months without a driver or bios update?
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I deal with customer computers all day that were brand new when purchased and have gone in many cases years without so much as a driver update. Bios updates are rarely necessary unless there is a serious problem, and updating drivers doesn't usually bring much to the table unless you're a gamer.

I'm not surprised that they uploaded new software - they've done it for the MER rovers many times, but in each case it was to offer an improvement, not replace something that wasn't there in the first place. I'm just surprised that the rover essentially landed with it's software in an incomplete state.

RoGuE1230 said:
Remember they bricked one of the Viking landers by upgrading the software...the new software instructed it to lower it's antenna making the lander useless as they could no longer communicate.
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Yeah similar thing happened to the Mars Global Surveyor. It ended up orienting it's battery toward the sun, which caused it to overheat and fail.

Term-X said:
We made the crazy landing! Let's upgrade the software... <brick>. :p
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Well it has a complete secondary computer onboard for redundancy if all else fails.

Skripka said:
And remember that rover was launch and spec/built years ago...and even when spec'd and built they used old and tried tech. Hubble is using 486 hardware for example....and the 586 was an "upgrade" sent up in 1999 IIRC.
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Skripka said:
And remember that rover was launch and spec/built years ago...and even when spec'd and built they used old and tried tech. Hubble is using 486 hardware for example....
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Dude... 486 was released in 1989, and wasn't even commercialy available until late 1989. Hubble was launched in April 1990. That would be the equvilent of launching a space telescope today with an Ivy Bridge on-board. In no way, shape, or form, was the 486 old tech when Hubble was launched. Pretty amazing actually.
 
GotNoRice said:
I deal with customer computers all day that were brand new when purchased and have gone in many cases years without so much as a driver update. Bios updates are rarely necessary unless there is a serious problem, and updating drivers doesn't usually bring much to the table unless you're a gamer.
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...And do you think a brand new billion dollar rover would fall closer to your customers mass-production thoroughly-consumer-tested PCs or the gamer that put together his own machine?
 
Neb said:
The latest news briefing that happened on the 10th had a fairly good explanation on how they're going to implement the software update.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/24606644

Software discussion begins around 41:05
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And to add to the basic woes of it, please remember it has a terrible TERRIBLE connection rate at the moment. Something nearing dialup (like 53k i think) roughly 4-6 hours a day and that could be intermittent based on horizon of Odyssey and the other satellite or dust storms. They're figuring out the intricacies of the connection though and sometime in the near future they'll be updating Odyssey and Curiousity with 2 MB/s exchange rates with earth. On top of that, the rover has a day/night cycle that it has to adhere to for the most part to keep energy reserves clear for other tests. So yeah, this is going to be slow. :p
 
Does curiosity need to be switched from AHCI to IDE mode for the upgrade to work?
 
Kueller said:
...And do you think a brand new billion dollar rover would fall closer to your customers mass-production thoroughly-consumer-tested PCs or the gamer that put together his own machine?
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It was a proper response to your question, I guess your witty analogy didn't hold up.

Kueller said:
When was the last time you had a brand new machine go 9 months without a driver or bios update?
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The entire upgrade going to take a period of 4 days. :eek: I would hope they have some hello messages being sent periodically
 
GotNoRice said:
It was a proper response to your question, I guess your witty analogy didn't hold up.
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My question asked about You, not your customers/friends/family. Your response is not applicable to my question as stated. Except for the part about you (the gamer) finding benefits from updates...so I suppose you did agree with me, even if you were trying your best not to, lol.
 
Is it really an upgrade when the software has a completely different function? Otherwise, it's like saying OpenOffice is an upgrade to Photoshop. Software change or swapout, yes. Upgrade, no.
 
Gotta love the ego driven wanna-be rocket scientist slash nasa programmers in here. Just cuz you Doogie Howsers built a few computers and wrote some code for whatever company, don't make you experts in this field. I mean it's not like we're talking about a cash register program, this is deep space interplanetary technology we're talking about here. Your opinions mean shit in this regard....
 
Ski said:
Gotta love the ego driven wanna-be rocket scientist slash nasa programmers in here. Just cuz you Doogie Howsers built a few computers and wrote some code for whatever company, don't make you experts in this field. I mean it's not like we're talking about a cash register program, this is deep space interplanetary technology we're talking about here. Your opinions mean shit in this regard....
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I failed to see who exactly was "giving their opinion" or insulting NASA scientists. There are a few people who were wondering why the software was included and others mentioned it wasn't an upgrade but a new package... a few bricking jokes and comments about previous errors... far from ego driven ;-)
 
Kor said:
I believe it's to do with the potential degradation of the storage while en route to Mars, the radiation out there can do horrible things to flash memory. As a result the capacity is pretty limited and extremely shielded.
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This. The most radiation-hardened flash storage they could fit when they were building Curiosity was 4GB (for each of the two computers). NASA had to do these sort of software updates a bunch of times with Spirit and Opportunity, I'd imagine they're being very careful about not bricking their new toy.

Curiosity is actually pretty state-of-the-art when it comes to radiation-hardened electronics. The Air Force is still using 1GB core memory modules the size of a suitcase for some avionics.
 
From Wikipedia:
The two identical on-board rover computers, called "Rover Compute Element" (RCE), contain radiation-hardened memory to tolerate the extreme radiation from space and to safeguard against power-off cycles. Each computer's memory includes 256 KB of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of flash memory.[29] This compares to 3 MB of EEPROM, 128 MB of DRAM, and 256 MB of flash memory used in the Mars Exploration Rovers.
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There are two computers, or RCE, on the rover. They are identical in every fashion. The second is a backup in case the first one fails or has issues.

The rover also has two sets of flash memory to store images and data from its onboard science equipment. One set of flash memory is in the MastCam and the other is the flash memory on the RCE. The MastCam flash memory, according to the most recent news conference, is only accessible by the rover's software.

Basically it works like this:
Code: 
MastCam takes pictures 
-> stores it on the camera's flash memory 
-> rover's software transfers it to the main flash memory 
-> transmits it to Odyssey or MRO overhead to be transferred back to Earth.

The software given to Curiosity was only for launch, cruise/transit, and EDL (entry, descent, landing) sequence-- basically the flight software (FSW). What they'll do over the next 4 sol days is replace three of the four programs with programs suited for rover movement and scientific experiments and analysis. There isn't enough space to hold both the FSW (R9) and FSW (R10) in the EEPROM memory.

Explanation here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/24606644
(Fast forward to around the 40 or 41 minute mark.)

We're talking about 256KB of EEPROM memory on each of the two RCEs to hold all of this. It is significantly less than the 3MB used by the previous rovers. This is a rover that has been in the design stages and built over the last 8 years since 2004. There could be any number of explanations why they didn't use a larger capacity memory such as costs or budgetary constraints, but these are all radiation hardened electronics. Coupled to the fact that the rover is powered by an RTG (radioisotope thermal generator) that the rest of the equipment has to be radiation shielded from that as well. So, probably the larger capacity EEPROM memory would have been too large to use on the rover because of the radiation shielding. That and there are two sets of these computers on the rover. So, space constraint could have been another issue.

Another problem is that they have been using only 8kb (kilobit) per second transfer rates. They should be up to full speed transfer rate by this week hopefully which is 2 Mbit/sec. That and the fact that the Deep Space Network system is only available at certain times of the day. That means the software update has to be uploaded all at once to BOTH computers in one day.
 
Maybe Adobe wrote the software for it. Though I highly doubt that since it made it like 3 days without needing an update. :D

I imagine they have some redundant systems on there though, so if it was to fail it can probably fall back.
 
Actually that's another thing, is there a reason they did not go with solar? Is it because the atmosphere there just does not allow enough UV rays through? From the pics it looks like the sky is very hazy there, guessing because of the dust. That's another interesting effect with a weaker gravity, fne dust probably floats.
 
I might be wrong, but, I took from the reading that the Curiosity already has the update, and that it had its software for the upgrade all along, and that it is not a matter of transmission.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Actually that's another thing, is there a reason they did not go with solar? Is it because the atmosphere there just does not allow enough UV rays through? From the pics it looks like the sky is very hazy there, guessing because of the dust. That's another interesting effect with a weaker gravity, fne dust probably floats.
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3 reasons that I know of.

1) Powerdraw, between the motor system to drive, and the science pack, MSL (i.e. Curiosity) draws a LOT more power then the MER's (i.e. Spirit and Opportunity), a solar/battery pack would be heavier and bulkier then the RTG. Gotta remember, the MER's weigh 180kilos (~400lbs), the MSL weighs 900 kilos (just shy of a ton) Driving that much around would require a LOT of solar panels.

2) The solar panels were heavily degraded over time by dust. with the MER's original mission only supposed to last 90 days or so (everything past that was bonus), that wasn't an issue, but with Curiosity's mission supposed to last ~2 years, it becomes an issue.

3) Additionally, the RTG (RadioThermic Generator) has enough juice to last ~15 years at normal/nearly-normal operations. So if there is a bonus, and if that bonus becomes a huge bonus (like it did with Opportunity) the rover will have power. Opportunity has very low per/day operational time because of how much the panels have been degraded.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Actually that's another thing, is there a reason they did not go with solar? Is it because the atmosphere there just does not allow enough UV rays through? From the pics it looks like the sky is very hazy there, guessing because of the dust. That's another interesting effect with a weaker gravity, fne dust probably floats.
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From another Wiki article:
Solar panels were also considered for the MSL, but RTGs provide constant power, regardless of the time of day, and thus the versatility to work in dark environments and high latitudes where solar energy is not readily available.
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Given all the equipment onboard, an RTG is a better choice over solar panels. This would allow the rover to run continuously without worrying about dust cleaning events or night time. Another benefit is that the rover doesn't have to carry batteries that may be at risk of leakage or degradation.

The RTG should allow the rover, at minimum, 14 years of operational use which is far longer than its planned 2 year mission run.
 
Zumino Zufeilon said:
3 reasons that I know of.

1) Powerdraw, between the motor system to drive, and the science pack, MSL (i.e. Curiosity) draws a LOT more power then the MER's (i.e. Spirit and Opportunity), a solar/battery pack would be heavier and bulkier then the RTG. Gotta remember, the MER's weigh 180kilos (~400lbs), the MSL weighs 900 kilos (just shy of a ton) Driving that much around would require a LOT of solar panels.
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I'm skeptical it would even be possible to power MSL with panels. Moving a 1 ton object requires high-torque motors, and those puppies pull lots of power...On solar, just moving the MSL would probably zero out the batteries.
 
Skripka said:
I'm skeptical it would even be possible to power MSL with panels. Moving a 1 ton object requires high-torque motors, and those puppies pull lots of power...On solar, just moving the MSL would probably zero out the batteries.
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I don't know about that, but it would be pretty weight inefficient. Look at a Tesla Roadster, it moves JUST fine. It just would take a significant amount of time to recharge the batteries on solar.

That said, the MSL would be better off then a Tesla due to not needing to go from 0 - 60mph in 3.9 seconds, and the range wouldn't be as big an issue either. Though battery performance in cold environments suffers considerably.
 
Zumino Zufeilon said:
I don't know about that, but it would be pretty weight inefficient. Look at a Tesla Roadster, it moves JUST fine. It just would take a significant amount of time to recharge the batteries on solar.

That said, the MSL would be better off then a Tesla due to not needing to go from 0 - 60mph in 3.9 seconds, and the range wouldn't be as big an issue either. Though battery performance in cold environments suffers considerably.
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MSL already has batteries on board, 2 of them...but to charge a combined total of 84Ah on solar, on mars would take forever. The RTG is rated for 100-125W electrical power continuously day or night, but that is continuous versus the 500W max you'd ever get at high noon on Mars at daytime.
 
I wish I could take control of the rover, ride around Mars and shit.

I wonder how hard it would be to send an object to Mars.
 
So... even NASA launches programs in beta. They must be recruiting from Gearbox now.
 
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