After landing on Mars, the Mars Rover Curiosity immediately started working doing its first test run by sending a series of images of the landing zone with its various cameras. Between 10 and 13 August, however, Curiosity stopped to install a new software for the management of ground operations.
The Mars Rover Curiosity is equipped with two computers so that if one should fail the other might take it over to continue its mission. Apparently, the computers hardware is low level: a 200 MHz CPU, 256 MB of ECC DRAM, 2 GB of ECC memory and 256 KB of flash EEPROM. Now you can find a tablet with more powerful hardware for relatively little money.
Actually, the memory of the Mars Rover Curiosity is of a special kind because it has to tolerate Mars extreme environment, meaning radiation that are not filtered by the thin atmosphere. It must also be safeguarded against accidental deletion when Curiosity turns off during the night.
It should also be noted that the Mars Rover Curiosity must perform certain very specific tasks and not display animated icons or other special effects that require a lot of computing power. The memory is still too little to hold all the programs it has to use during its life but it wasn’t necessary to have them all from the beginning.
When it landed, the Mars Rover Curiosity used a program suitable to touch down safely on the Martian surface. Once that phase was over, that software became useless so the memory can be reused for a program suitable to manage Curiosity’s ground operations. That’s exactly what was transmitted from the control center during the long update.
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A key element of the new software is the ability to analyze images in search of obstacles. This will allow the Mars Rover Curiosity to travel on safer routes reducing the risks to encounter obstacles. That’s important because at the control center they could become aware of them too late because of the time that radio signals take to reach Earth.
NASA announced that the update was successfully completed so in the next few days new tests will be performed of the instruments of the Mars Rover Curiosity and the first test drive will start. At the end of all these tests, Curiosity will start its journey to Mount Sharp, also known as Aeolis Mons.
This mountain about 5.5 km (18.000 ft) high is at the center of Gale Crater, where the rover landed. The distance is about 8 km (5 miles) but Curiosity travels quite slowly so it will take several months to reach it. On the road, it will perform various analyzes of the soil and of course it will keep on sending pictures.
