Engineers from the European Space Agency (ESA) are preparing to upgrade Windows 98 to an orbiter orbiting Mars. The Mars Express spacecraft has been in operation for more than 19 years, and the Mars Advanced Radar Instrument for Underground and Ionospheric Drilling (MARSIS) on board uses software created using Windows 98. Fortunately for humanity and in the name of the Red Planet, ESA is an upgrade of their systems to Windows ME.
ESA’s Mars Express MarsSIS instrument was key to the discovery of a huge underground aquifer with liquid water on the Red Planet in 2018. This major new software upgrade “will allow it to see beneath the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in more detail than at any time before “, according to ESA. The agency originally launched the Mars Express into space in 2003 as its first mission to the Red Planet and has spent nearly two decades exploring the planet’s surface.
MARSIS uses low-frequency radio waves that bounce off the surface of Mars to search for water and study the atmosphere of the Red Planet. The instrument’s 130-foot antenna is capable of searching about three miles below the surface of Mars, and software upgrades will improve signal reception and on-board data processing to improve the quality of data sent back to Earth.
The South Pole of Mars, as seen by the Mars Express. Image: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
“We faced a number of challenges to improve MARSIS’s performance,” explains Carlo Nena, a software engineer at Enginium who helps ESA upgrade. “Last but not least, because the MARSIS software was originally designed more than 20 years ago using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!”
ESA and operators at the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) relied on the high-resolution storage technique of the MARSIS instrument, but it quickly filled the onboard memory. “By discarding data we don’t need, the new software allows us to turn on MARSIS five times longer and explore a much larger area with each pass,” said Andrea Chicketti, MARSIS operations manager at INAF. “The new software will help us explore these high-resolution regions more quickly and in-depth and confirm whether they are home to new sources of water on Mars. It’s really like having a brand new instrument on board the Mars Express almost 20 years after launch. “
ESA did not specify the exact software that MARSIS is upgrading to, but it is unlikely that the team upgraded its processor and enabled TPM 2.0 in the BIOS to install Windows 11. Isn’t that right?
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