Patch management for the latest versions of Windows may be a concern for most of us here on Earth, but now the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft has received the first update to its Windows 98-based system in 19 years.
The mission was launched first Discovery of signs of liquid water on Marsincluding a suspected 20 x 30 km saltwater lake buried under 1.5 km of ice in the Red Planet’s southern polar region.
The updates were carried out by engineers of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), Italy, and were funded entirely by the Italian space agency (AS I).
What does that mean?
The agency said the upgrade will allow the spacecraft to see Mars and its moon Phobos with better levels of detail.
The Mars Advanced Radar for subsurface and ionospheric soundings (MARSIS) instrument on Mars Express uses its 40-meter-long antenna to transmit low-frequency radio waves toward the planet.
Most of these waves reflect off the planet’s surface, but significant amounts travel through the crust and reflect at interfaces between layers of different subsurface materials, including ice, earth, rock, and water.
By examining the reflected signals, scientists can map the structure beneath the surface of Mars to a depth of several kilometers and study properties such as the thickness and composition of its polar ice caps, as well as the properties of volcanic and sedimentary rock strata.
However, the space agency didn’t go into great detail on the specs of the hardware receiving the update Tom’s hardware There has been speculation that it might have a Pentium 90 processor, meaning it might be possible Run classic games like Doom as well as explore the mysteries of Mars.
“To study the most important features on Mars and its moon Phobos in general, we used to rely on a complex technique that stored a lot of high-resolution data and filled the instrument’s on-board memory very quickly,” said Andrea Cicchetti, the deputy MARSIS investigator and operations manager at INAF.
He added: “By discarding data we don’t need, the new software allows us to turn on MARSIS five times longer and explore a much larger area with each pass.”
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