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That's SOP for these Mars missions. Most if not all of our landers have had the software loaded on the fly as it got to Mars. The orbitter than was mixed between English and metric measurements and tried to go through the planet had it's orbiting routine loaded minutes before it started the manuever. Fully writing and testing the software has to happen after the hardware is made, so you can either launch with incomplete software and try to get it finished before your object completes it's journey or delay the mission a year and a half and launch then. In general this way is better, though some complications can arise.