I don't see why it wouldn't be...

It's not like NASA is worried someone else is going to steal their software and send their own rover to mars using it...

More likely, they may be worried someone is going to find a vulnerability and take control of their multi-jillion-dollar piece of equipment.

At least in this case physical access is an extremely improbable attack vector...

If a third party can break into the satellite and communications firmware of two different spacefaring nations (you have to hijack an orbiter too) then there are bigger problems to worry about. The number of countries (counting the ESA as one big country) with objects in orbit around Mars can be counted on one hand.

Well, I asked people who are world class competitive security competitors and had succes in HACK A SAT how's the satelites and stuff security and they said that it aint good

On the other hand, I’m not sure satellites launched years ago have auto-upgrades enabled and up-to-date security policies (and certificates!), especially upgrade policies for the embedded chipsets. That must be an interesting problem to solve.

True. I'm not saying they should be worried about that at all, but it seems like something somebody might be worried about anyway.

That occurred to me as well, but I imagine this is separated from the communications.

Maybe it's not controlled at all... it does say autonomous, after all.

I imagine all commands have to get signed for the rover to accept them, but even if their keys were compromised and some vulnerability was found in the software, wouldn't you also need a network of really big dishes (see DSN) to actually send the commands to the rover?

> Wouldn’t you also need a big network of dishes

Nah, you can subscribe to big-dishes-on-demand using AWS Ground Station.

Wait, they did exactly that: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

While some innovate, once again AWS reaps the margins of the whole space conquest by discretely providing the infrastructure that everyone needs. Clever!

I honestly chuckled because of your AWS parody.

Than I clicked the link...

Same. Now I'm wondering what they're not offering.

Reminds me of this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48743043

A lot of speculation here, but the real reason is likely a mix of export control (ITAR) and proprietary components. Essentially, anything that could potentially be used in a missile is very tightly controlled technology and is difficult to release to the public.

Generally these things don't get open sourced. They really should be in the long run but these things take time.

Even Journals don't insist on code yet unfortunately.

They might have licensed closed source components from third party vendors that prevent them from open sourcing the whole thing.

Maybe, but I doubt it. I'm currently working on another NASA rover project (going to the Moon, not Mars) and we don't use any third party code. Our code is based off of another open source NASA project (Core Flight System), but we don't open-source our exact flight software. Mostly this is simply because we have to go through a lengthy vetting process to ensure we don't inappropriately release anything that falls under ITAR or EAR, and we just don't have the extra time or budget for it.

Typically at NASA it's the more open-ended research projects that have time and support for open sourcing their code. There's less benefit in releasing a specific rover's flight software than there is in releasing the general framework that said software is based on.

Excellent info, thank you!