A surprising piece of information has emerged about the spacecraft sent to Mars by the European Space Agency (ESA) about 20 years ago. A press release by the European Space Agency revealed that the vehicle on the Mars Express research mission still uses a Windows 98-based computer.
Why is 20-year-old MARSIS running Windows 98?
The Mars Express mission is ESA’s first mission to the Red Planet. Launched on June 2, 2003 as part of the mission, the MARSIS instrument has provided very important information about Mars for nearly 20 years. However, ESA said they had to do a software update after a long time.
Andrea Cicchetti, who served on ESA’s Mars Express mission, said two decades of service have been crucial in researching and discovering signs of water on Mars. MARSIS, one of the most important parts of the mission, has been using Windows 98 for years.
The latest press release by ESA said that MARSIS is continuing its mission with the software update. Carlo Nenna, who worked as a software engineer on the job, said that they have had some difficulties with the performance of MARSIS recently. However, interestingly, he underlined that they did not have problems with Windows 98.
We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS. But that wasn’t because MARSIS was originally designed 20 years ago using a Microsoft Windows 98-based development environment.
The report stated that the new software update has been successfully applied to Mars Express. It was also stated that they wanted to take MARSIS further and make it more useful.
Speaking on the subject, Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson said years later that it was strange to work on different software than Windows 98. “It’s almost like having a brand new instrument aboard the Mars Express 20 years later,” Wilson said.
So what do you think about the Mars Express mission still running on Windows 98? Do not forget to share your views with us in the comments section.
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