The Mars Express spacecraft is finally getting a Windows 98 upgrade

Engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) are getting ready for a Windows 98 upgrade on an orbiter circling Mars.

The Mars Express spacecraft has been operating for more than 19 years, and the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument onboard has been using software built using Windows 98.

Thankfully for humanity and the Red Planet’s sake, the ESA isn’t upgrading its systems to Windows ME.

The MARSIS instrument on ESA’s Mars Express was key to the discovery of a huge underground aquifer of 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 ever before,” according to the ESA.

The agency originally launched the Mars Express into space in 2003 as its first mission to the Red Planet, and it 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 Red Planet’s atmosphere.

The instrument’s 130-foot antenna is capable of searching around three miles below the surface of Mars, and the software upgrades will enhance the signal reception and onboard data processing to improve the quality of data that’s sent back to Earth.

“We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS,” explains Carlo Nenna, a software engineer at Enginium who is helping ESA with the upgrade. “Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!”

The ESA and operators at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) have relied on a technique to store lots of high-resolution data on the MARSIS instrument, but it fills up the onboard memory quickly.

“By discarding data that we don’t need, the new software allows us to switch MARSIS on for five times as long and explore a much larger area with each pass,” says Andrea Cicchetti, a MARSIS operation manager at INAF.

“The new software will help us more quickly and extensively study these regions in high resolution and confirm whether they are home to new sources of water on Mars. It really is like having a brand new instrument on board Mars Express almost 20 years after launch.”

More details have emerged of the Win2k-running US Navy aircraft carrier we reported as being planned back in July. According to Government Computer News the CVN 77 will commence construction in February next year, and will be commissioned, running ‘Son of Windows,’ in 2008.

Roll that seven year period back instead of forward, and it’d be reasonable for you to wonder how on earth the Navy knows what it’s buying into. Microsoft has produced three major OS revs since then, and in 1993 hadn’t even started imagining Windows 2000. Rationally, the decision must have been based on faith that Microsoft will be able to deliver a robust, standardised operating system that can be used for CVN 77’s IT infrastructure, and that the Navy will therefore be able to benefit from the cost-savings in training, procurement and maintenance associated with commodity operating systems.

In Microsoft’s defence we should point out that this is they way these contracts generally go - large supplier (e.g. IBM) promises it’ll work several years down the line, but for most of that period it’s expensive slideware. Then when it ships, late, it probably doesn’t work anyway.

Microsoft is working as a subcontractor with Lockheed Martin to develop the carrier’s integrated warfare systems, and ‘Windows for Warfare’ will run a variety of systems, including communications, aircraft and weapons launchers, and ship’s electronics.

The difference, according to GCN. is that one OS can be used to run many operations, whereas the existing situation is that you’ve got different software running different systems. Lockheed Martin says Microsoft was chosen for the gig because it had “a lot of insight that could help Lockheed Martin stay current with commercial technology.” Ominously, a Microsoft Government (an ominous thought in itself) spokesman says: “This is a new area for us.”

More interestingly, retired admiral Willie Williamson, who is now business strategy executive director for Microsoft Government, says “Microsoft software could let the ship’s crew know when there’s a pending failure in a ship’s engineering system, for example.” Which makes it clear Microsoft will have to put a lot of development effort into real time monitoring and control systems. Which might be Win2k, Jim, but not as we know it. It becomes even more clearly an act of faith if you ask yourself how many vehicle manufacturers currently use a Microsoft OS to control their systems, rather than just to run non mission critical entertainment and navigation plug-ins. None, did we hear? But we’re sure the Navy knows best. ®

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