An illustration of the Mars Express spacecraft launched in 2003. Illustration: ESA
The days of telephone Internet, AOL Instant Messenger, and Myspace may have ended on Earth, but on Mars, the early years of the Internet are still alive. A Martian spacecraft has been running software designed more than 20 years ago in a proprietary Microsoft Windows 98-based environment and has long had to be upgraded.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is updating the MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ioniospheric Sounding) software for its Mars Express orbiter, 19 years after the spacecraft was launched. The MARSIS instrument, the first radar probe to orbit another planet, helped discover evidence of water on Mars in 2018. MARSIS sends low-frequency radio waves to the planet using a huge 131-foot antenna long (40 meters), as the Mars Express spacecraft orbits Mars.
MARSIS does all this using very obsolete software that has not been updated since the launch of the spacecraft in June 2003. The software was designed in a Windows 98-based environment, which does not work with the current Internet except that you jumped. through many hoops. “After decades of fruitful science and having gained a good understanding of Mars, we wanted to push the performance of the instrument beyond some of the limitations required when the mission began,” Andrea Cicchetti, Assistant Principal Investigator at MARSIS , who led the development of the update. , he said in a statement.
The new software was designed by the National Institute of Astrophysics of Italy, which operates the spacecraft. The team behind the new software implemented a series of upgrades that would improve the instrument’s ability to send and receive signals, as well as its on-board data processing “to increase the quantity and quality of scientific data. sent to Earth, “according to ESA. .
“Previously, to study the most important features of Mars and to study its moon Phobos, we relied on a complex technique that stored a lot of high-resolution data and filled the instrument’s internal memory very quickly,” Cicchetti said. dit. “By discarding the data we don’t need, the new software allows us to turn on MARSIS for five more times and explore a much larger area with each pass.”
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The new software will be used to study regions near the South Pole of Mars, where signs of liquid water were previously detected on the red planet in lower-resolution data. With MARSIS abandoning its Windows 98-era software, you will be able to examine these regions much more quickly, using high-resolution data. Finding out if Mars had liquid water is crucial to knowing if the planet was habitable during its initial history and if it could possibly have hosted some form of life.
Mars Express has been working hard for the past 19 years, with the spacecraft’s mission expanded seven times so far. While currently ESA’s lowest-cost mission, Mars Express has been delivering valuable data about Mars and its moon Phobos. And with the new software update, the team behind the spacecraft is expecting bigger things from this retro orbiter. “It’s really like having a new instrument aboard Mars Express almost 20 years after launch,” Cicchetti said.