NASA: DOS Glitch Nearly Killed Mars Rover

Wednesday, Aug. 25 2004 | Author: Scrivs

Is it scary to find that we pay these people millions of dollars a year to only find out that they are using DOS for their billion dollar machines or that they had to hack DOS to get the thing back working again?

In a presentation at the Hot Chips conference here, Denise said that the real issue was an embedded DOS file system whose directory structure kept growing and growing. When the rover’s embedded operating system then told the flash memory to mirror the data structure in RAM, the unexpectedly large file caused a fatal error and an almost continuous reboot cycle, he said.

Should’ve used <insert fav OS here>.

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8 Responses for "NASA: DOS Glitch Nearly Killed Mars Rover"

Geof

August 25th, 2004 at 11:52 am
1

I’m a NASA contractor, FWIW. The reason that highly outmoded hardware and software is used by NASA is because it is relatively reliable at some level. It’s friggin’ hard to send patches to these spacecraft, and they’re remote and expensive, so you do with the most battle-tested stuff you can do the job with.
Scrivs

August 25th, 2004 at 2:24 pm
2

I figured it had something to do with that, but then I would also think that there would be some intense testing on other offerings (*cough*linux*cough*) so that they could move ahead.

Seems NASA took a more of a not broke, don’t fix mentaility instead of a can this be improved mentality.
Sunny

August 26th, 2004 at 1:47 am
3

I have read somewhere that NASA has very strict guidelines for what sort of software goes up, including a rule that specifies that the software should have been available for 5 years on Earth.

Don’t know how true this is. I had heard about this in relation to a Hubble upgrade few years back.
JC

August 26th, 2004 at 10:12 am
4

at least they stopped using punch cards… it was a real pain having to go out into deep space to clean up jams.

It’s not like theres anything wrong with using dos. It’s tiny, it’s easy to write software for (or so I’m told…), and it’s solid. Less to break. And they could fix it over something like a 1 byte per minute connection, all the way from here. Imagine loading linux patches over that. :-)
Johnny

August 31st, 2004 at 8:46 am
5

I thought NASA used Windows XP…
tonyMac

April 22nd, 2005 at 10:27 pm
6

Well…
To tell you the truth, on a control level, I would be using a minimal OS, one with as little junk to go wrong as possible. The only OS that fits that bill is DOS, really, I’ve had a lot of issues with *nix OS’s and hardware, I do a lot with robotics, and DOS, a c ompiler, and a good assembler are my tools. Anything more complex just gets in the way.
tonyMac

April 22nd, 2005 at 10:32 pm
7

I mean, they could be using CP/M, I guess…
Charles Childers

April 23rd, 2005 at 2:45 am
8

The problem was with the flash memory drive and DOS file system. The OS that powers the rovers is VxWorks by WindRiver Technologies. Take a look at http://www.windriver.com/device_designs/aerospace_and_defense/nasa_jpl_mars_rovers.html for more details on VxWorks.