Did you know that the Mars Express spacecraft works with Windows 98? Well, yes, but not for long.
The European Space Agency is ready to offer Mars Express an interstellar software update, incorporating the operating system of the MARSIS instrument into the current year. The MARSIS instrument was famous for its discovery of liquid water on the red planet.
Mars Express has been running a modified version of Windows 98 since the beginning of its mission, more than 19 years ago. Since the release of Windows 98, there have been 9 different operating systems from Microsoft, including 2000, ME (high), XP, Vista (double fucking), 7, 8 (the coolest), 8.1, 10 and the recent 11.
Satisfying all the nerds in the world’s operating system, Tom Warren of The Verge made a fantastic joke that I can’t stop posting: “Luckily for humanity and the red planet, ESA is not updating its systems to Windows ME “.
“After decades of fruitful science and having acquired a good understanding of Mars, we wanted to push the instrument’s performance beyond some of the limitations required when the mission began,” said the deputy IP and chief operating officer. of MARSIS of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics), Andrea Cicchetti.
“We have faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS,” said Carlo Nenna, MARSIS engineer and software engineer on board Enginium.
“No less important because MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a Microsoft Windows 98-based development environment!”
No, Mars Express won’t have Windows 11 either. My God, imagine the bloatware.
Instead, Mars Express will get a proprietary operating system. This operating system has been designed by the INAF and Nenna team.
And it’s not just for the good that Windows 98 has been an operating system for decades. The new software will really enable new features on the spacecraft.
“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,” he added. Cicchetti.
“By discarding the data we don’t need, the new software allows us to turn on MARSIS five more times and explore a much larger area with each pass.
“The new software will help us study these regions more quickly and extensively in high resolution and confirm if they are home to new water sources on Mars. It’s really like having a new instrument aboard Mars Express almost 20 years later of the launch “.
Windows 98 is often considered one of the best PC operating systems, long before Microsoft began filling its operating systems with Internet-dependent services, tabs, and widgets. In fact, it was one of the first operating systems designed with the Internet in mind, although some may view it as an unnecessary upgrade to Windows 95.
ESA is applying the update to the Mars Express spacecraft running Windows 98 right now.