Real-Time Operating System – Even On Mars
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NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has now been trundling across the planet Mars for three very productive and eventful years. Curiosity landed on the night of Aug. 5, 2012, pulling off a dramatic and unprecedented touchdown with the aid of a rocket-powered “sky crane” that lowered the 1-ton rover gently to the Martian surface via cables.
While the Mars Science Laboratory flight team created a plan to get Curiosity to Mars, the software did a lot of the heavy lifting. And Curiosity has a pretty major job to do.
The smart software for Curiosity, on which NASA’s program and applications operate, was developed by Wind River, an Intel-subsidiary. In 2012, the Real-Time special operating system helped the rover Curiosity manage avionics, collect data and more.
According to the Mars Exploration Rover goals, the spacecraft is responsible for helping with four endeavors:
- Determine whether Life ever arose on Mars.
- Characterize the Climate of Mars.
- Characterize the Geology of Mars.
- Prepare for Human Exploration.
And because Mars is, at any given time, between 36 million to more than 250 million miles away, radio signals can take up to 22 minutes to reach the rover’s receiver. This means that Curiosity was on its own during the landing sequence and NASA officials had to wait an excruciating 14 minutes to find out whether the landing was a success.
There’s even a video of the landing:
The data that is sent back to earth reaches it after several minutes due to the distance between Mars and Earth, requiring an accurate and reliable operating system that needn’t be fixed and, indeed, Curiosity has been operating autonomously for three years now.
Wind River solutions are used in many prestigious projects in Israel and globally. Israel Aerospace Industries recently announced that Taxibot, a semi-robotic, pilot-controlled tractor that tows aircrafts from the gate to the runway is also using Wind River’s VxWorks operating system.
The operating systems will be presented at the AUS&R 2015 exhibition on September 7th.
To learn more about these projects and the operating system, Scaleil is having a seminar on September 9th. For more details, click here.
