Questions tagged [space-technology]

8 questions
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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…
InfinitiesLoop
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What software programming languages were used by the Soviet Union's space program?

I got interested in the Soviet space program and was interested to discover that the software on the Buran spacecraft circa 1988 was written in Prolog. Does anyone know what languages might have been used in earlier missions, especially the Mars…
shamp00
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Development process used for the code on Apollo 11 missions?

The Apollo missions had technology no more complicated than a pocket calculator. From link here, there's an information about Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) The on-board Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was about 1 cubic foot with 2K of 16-bit RAM…
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Code development process for Voyager mission?

Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in August 2012 and is the most distant human-made object in existence. Launched just shortly after its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, in 1977, Voyager 1 explored the Jovian and Saturnian systems discovering new…
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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…
maxfridbe
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Why would it take hours to decode transmissions from Curiosity rover via MRO?

This video clip by NASA says that data from Curiosity relayed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) would be stored for a few hours, then transmitted to Earth (apparently taking about 14 minutes), after which it would take hours for engineers to…
Matt
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Can message passing be used for a CPU redundancy and load-balancing construct

In bare metal or minimal RTOS type embedded systems with multiple processors is it possible to have an identical program running on each processor that uses Message Passing Interface (MPI) to provide load balancing and also redundancy in the case of…
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Are there any FOSS operating systems available that conform to NASA's JPL coding standards?

I, like many others, have been completely enamored with the recent successful landing of Mar's Curiosity rover. After reading a couple of articles, and following a few links, I've found a couple C based coding standards that NASA JPL uses to…
RLH
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