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Tag Archive for space-technology

What is the Mars Curiosity Rover’s software built in?

The Mars Curiosity rover has landed successfully, and one of the promo videos “7 minutes of terror” brags about there being 500,000 lines of code. It’s a complicated problem, no doubt. But that is a lot of code, surely there was a pretty big programming effort behind it. Does anyone know anything about this project? I can only imagine it’s some kind of embedded C.

What is Curiosity’s packet structure?

For NASA’s Interplanetary Network, what does a packet look like? It’s obviously a form of redundant protocol, stored at the receiver and with built back up. Is there any documentation on the packet structure or the communication protocol, which has to span 14 minute communications?