The Mars Express spacecraft has finally gets Windows 98 update

Engineers of European Space Agency (ESA) are preparing to upgrade Windows 98 on an orbiter flying around Mars. Spaceship Mars Express has been working for over 19 years, and the tool Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) on board use software created using Windows 98. Fortunately for humanity and the Red Planet, ESA is not preparing to update its systems until Windows ME.

Tool MARSIS on the ship ESA Mars Express was key to the discovery of a vast underground aquifer of liquid water on the Red Planet in 2018. This new major software update “will allow you to see in greater detail below the surface of Mars and its moon Phobos, than ever before," ESA reports. The agency initially launched Mars Express into space in 2003 as its first mission to the Red Planet, and it has spent nearly two decades exploring the planet's surface.

MARSIS uses low-frequency radio waves reflected off the surface of Mars to search for water and study the Red Planet's atmosphere. The instrument's 130-foot antenna is capable of searching about three miles below the Martian surface, and software upgrades will improve signal reception and data processing on board to improve the quality of data sent back to Earth.

"We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS", - explains Carlo Nenna, software engineer of Enginium, which helps ESA with an update.  "Not least because the MARSIS software was originally developed over 20 years ago using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!"

ESA and operators of National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) relied on the technique to store large amounts of high-resolution data on the instrument MARSIS, but it quickly fills the on-board memory. “By discarding the data we don't need, the new software allows us to enable MARSIS five times longer and explore a much larger area with each pass", he says Andrea Cicchetti, operations manager MARSIS in INAF. "The new software will help us study these regions faster and in more detail at high resolution and confirm whether they are home to new water sources on Mars. It really feels like a brand new instrument on board Mars Express nearly 20 years after launch."

ESA does not say the exact software to be updated to MARSIS, but it's unlikely that the team updated its CPU and enabled it TPM 2.0 in BIOSto set Windows 11. Is it so? 

Source: The Verge