The Bugs that went to Mars and Terrorized Earth

Since its dramatic landing in Gale crater in August 2012, the Curiosity Rover has been busy exploring the surface of Mars, looking for evidence of past habitable environments. Having completed over 4 years on Mars, and with nearly 17 kms on its odometer, Curiosity has already made historic discoveries, finding evidence of an ancient freshwater streambed, organic molecules and other key ingredients necessary for life. Yet, in spite of its great successes, the mission has not been without a few hiccups. In this talk, we discuss the most significant of these: the Sol-200 anomaly, when the failure of a flash memory chip uncovered three latent software bugs that nearly killed the mission. We describe how the anomaly manifested itself, how recovery was achieved, and lessons learnt from the experience. The work described in this talk was carried out at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Speaker: Rajeev Joshi, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory