One of the European Space Agency’s lowest cost and most successful missions, the Mars Express, is finally receiving a software upgrade.
MARSIS gets an upgrade
Nineteen years after its launch, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument on the Mars Express is finally getting an update. This system update will allow it to view the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in greater detail.
“We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS,” says Carlo Nenna, MARSIS on-board software engineer at Enginium is implementing the upgrade. “Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!”
Upgrades to improve data resolution and processing
MARSIS’s first major scientific discovery occurred in 2018, when it was instrumental in unearthing an underground water reservoir on Mars, buried beneath 1.5 kilometers of ice and dust. By directing low-frequency radio waves towards the planet’s surface via its 40-meter long antenna, MARSIS was able to travel through and transmit data on multiple layers of Mars’s crust. Since then, MARSIS has discovered three more water sources, revealing multitudes of information on the planet’s structure and geology.
MARSIS’s new software, developed by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) team in Italy, includes upgrades designed to improve data resolution and processing. These upgrades were designed to increase the amount and quality of data sent back to Earth.
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Source: TechRadar
