The Mars Express was the European Space Agency’s first mission to the Red Planet
New Delhi:
The Mars Express project, one of the most successful missions launched by the European Space Agency (ESA), is receiving a software update. Mars Express’s Mars Advanced Radar for underground and ionospheric drilling (MARSIS) is now being updated, 19 years after its launch. It will be able to view beneath the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in greater detail, thanks to this significant software upgrade. The MARSIS instrument is well known for its involvement in the search for evidence of liquid water on Mars. ESA’s first mission to the Red Planet was the Mars Express.
Since its launch on June 2, 2003, the orbiter has spent nearly two decades exploring its neighbor on Earth and fundamentally changing the way we look at the past, present, and future of Mars. ESA engineers are now preparing an upgrade to Windows 98 on the orbiter around the surface of the Red Planet.
A press release from ESA quoted Andrea Chicketti, PI’s deputy and MARSIS operations manager at INAF, who is leading the development of the modernization, as saying: “After decades of fruitful science and a good understanding of Mars, we wanted to increase instrument performance beyond some of restrictions required prior to the start of the mission. “
MARSIS uses low-frequency radio waves reflected from the planet’s surface to search for water on Mars and learn more about its atmosphere. The upgrade includes a number of enhancements that improve signal reception and on-board data processing to increase the quantity and quality of research data returned to Earth. Even three miles below the surface of Mars, the instrument’s 130-foot antenna is able to search.
Carlo Nena, a software engineer at Enginium who is helping ESA upgrade, says they have faced a number of hurdles to increase MARSIS performance, adding: “Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed more than 20 years ago. using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98! ”
In the past, researchers had to rely on a sophisticated technique that stored a lot of high-resolution data and quickly filled the instrument’s built-in memory to study the most significant features of Mars and explore its moon Phobos. Now upgrading the software will allow them to turn on MARSIS for five times longer and explore a significantly larger area in each implementation, rejecting unnecessary data.
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