The newest, however most likely not the final, story of previous software program working in mission-critical operations involves us by way of the Twitter feed of guitar-playing Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. The European House Company’s Mars Categorical probe, presently in orbit across the Crimson Planet and doing simply tremendous, just lately had a main software program replace to extend its possibilities of discovering water there.
How do you replace Home windows 98 on a spaceship orbiting Mars? @esa is doing it for Mars Categorical, after 19 years. https://t.co/DRWtuaqo22 pic.twitter.com/xxkDz5GrL1June 22, 2022
Launched in 2003, the Mars Categorical, and its MARSIS (Mars Superior Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) water probe, naturally had software program developed utilizing one of many main working programs of the time — Home windows 98.
And that’s how we found that there is a pc that is most likely able to working Doom in orbit over Mars, notable not a lot for its abundance of alien life as it’s for being the setting for id Software program’s demon-blasting first-person shooter. Thanks, Colonel Hadfield!
ESA’s weblog on the topic doesn’t go into a substantial amount of element, significantly concerning the framerates we may anticipate from Doom on the Mars Categorical, or how giant of a display screen it has. “Not least as a result of the MARSIS software program was initially designed over 20 years in the past, utilizing a improvement surroundings primarily based on Microsoft Home windows 98!” the weblog reads.
We do know, nonetheless, that one of many favourite processors utilized by NASA is predicated on the Apple Mac G3 – it’s a single-core PowerPC 750 233MHz chip from the Bondi Blue iMac, and there are no less than two trundling round on Mars within the type of the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. Technically it’s referred to as a RAD750 as a result of it’s radiation-hardened, and it’s additionally discovered within the Kepler and Fermi house telescopes. G3s weren’t famous for his or her potential to run Home windows 98, nonetheless, so for the X86 package now we have to look to the Hubble House Telescope, which obtained a 25MHz 80486 CPU throughout a 1999 servicing mission, changing an 80386.
Subsequently we might be there being no less than a Pentium 90 on the Mars Categorical, which opens up the opportunity of taking part in Wing Commander Prophecy or perhaps even Ultima 7 on the scientific orbiter, alongside Doom and its first sequel.
Again to the software program replace, and it appears the brand new code for the probe “features a sequence of upgrades that enhance sign reception and on-board information processing to extend the quantity and high quality of science information despatched to Earth”.
“There are a lot of areas close to the south pole on Mars by which we could have already seen indicators indicating liquid water in lower-resolution information,” mentioned ESA Mars Categorical scientist Colin Wilson. “The brand new software program will assist us extra shortly and extensively research these areas in excessive decision and make sure whether or not they’re residence to new sources of water on Mars. It truly is like having a model new instrument on board Mars Categorical virtually 20 years after launch.”
So it sounds just like the Europeans would be the first to know if water, or a rampaging demon military, is found on that gleaming pink dot within the night time sky.
Replace 6/23/2024: Clarified OS particulars.
