New Scientist reports the Mars Odyssey orbiter has successfully performed it's first re-boot in 5 years."Odyssey has been orbiting Mars since 2001. The orbiter's last reboot was in October 2003.
Although a reboot is "not a risk-free event", continuing to operate the craft without refreshing its systems would have left it vulnerable to memory flaws, NASA said last week. Incoming charged particles from space, called cosmic rays, can cause errors in Odyssey's on-board memory that accumulate with time."
I'm thinking: No way is that spacecraft running Windows.
Definitely Linux. I mean, whats the point of open source if you can't share with the odd ET should it happen upon it.
ReplyDeleteXChequer
http://thenzhomeoffice.blogspot.com/
lol I think NASA uses a version of Fedora... but def Linux based =]
ReplyDeleteNo desktop OS is even remotely suitable for such a role. You need a hardened, embedded OS, with excellent fault tolerance and the ability to be updated on the fly, without interruption. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and any BSD* derivative need not apply.
ReplyDeleteIn this case, they use VxWorks running on... well...
RAD6000 microprocessors are radiation-hardened versions of the PowerPC chips that powered Macintosh computers in the early 1990s, with 128 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) and capable of carrying out about 20 million instructions per second. A critical feature of the spaceworthy chips -- developed jointly by BAE systems, JPL and the Air Force Research Laboratory -- is the radiation shielding, which uses a series of resistors and capacitors to ground harmful radiation before it can damage onboard electronics.