Bill Gates has not landed on Mars
By Davey Winder in Editorial
By now everyone and their aunt has heard the news that Bill Gates is stepping down from his role as Dr Evil. Sorry, I mean head honcho at Microsoft of course. Sure, he will still be the single largest shareholder, he will still be Chairman of the board, he will still be trying to give his vast fortune to good causes (thinks: Billsters Billions, great movie opportunity) but one thing he will not be doing is going to Mars.
Nor, for that matter, will Windows.
The currently much talked about Phoenix Lander is not a Windows driven beast. Instead it is powered by a specially designed mobo and CPU which runs VxWorks, an embedded Real Time OS.
Of course, this has much to do with stability as anything else. Now I am not knocking Microsoft here, but NASA take the whole stability thing very seriously indeed. Although you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise given some of their quality control mistakes over the decades. However, they do sacrifice speed and power for stability as is evidenced by the 33 MHz clock speed of the RISC Rad6000 CPU. Although it has not been confirmed, rumour suggests that 128Mb RAM is all that has gone to Mars as well.
Not surprising that an embedded RTOS has accompanied it then. I have enough trouble running Vista comfortably on an AMD Turion 64 clocked at 1.80 GHz with 1GB RAM.
Simon Barrett reveals how NASA manage to get around the 20 minute lag between sending a command from Earth and it being executed on Mars in his fascinating look at the software behind the Phoenix Lander mission. He explains how a whole day of tasks are sent in one batch, written in C. “The NASA programmers and engineers sent approximately 1000 to 1500 instructions to the lander every day.” Because of the importance of the code working, this is a Herculean task, no pun intended. As Barrett concludes “In layman’s terms, if your computer program has 100 steps in it, it will take you 10 days to write and test it. NASA are doing what a regular programmer would take nearly 5 months to achieve in 24 hours!”
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