I initially thought that the upgrade was needed because they released a new version as the rover was en-route to mars. That would make sense, but the article says that the upgrade was made to switch the rover from landing mode to driving mode. Why wouldn't they just send a 256mb flash drive along with that 2M pixel camera to upgrade the rover when it got there?

According to jgrahamc, it sounds like they driving software was finished en route and actually was uploaded to curiosity before it landed. Apparently, the past few days have been spent installing the software rather than downloading it from Earth.

My guess is weight + money. Not sure how much a space hardened flash costs. On top of that could be complexity costs.

Not quite. The reason is that the specs of the mission were frozen 2004.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/08/08/Curiosity-interview-...

I think the driving mode wasn't finished by the time the rover was sent.

I wonder if that was according to the original plan…

I doubt much of what actually happened was according to the original plan :)

most of the comments on that page are reprehensible

The page /itself/ is reprehensible. The amount of ads I had to close to read the article...

Does anyone have an article on the subject that isn't pointing to such an awful site?

Yah. The Internet is a horrible place when space.com has to resort to "One weird trick" ads.

Found this via news.google.com, which is also not great but slightly less tragic:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230151/NASA_upgrades...

It's interesting to put this in technology we all know.

So it takes them four days to release?

Not bad, considering the ftp is over 40 million miles and at 160 bps. Too bad they couldn't set up a CI server.

I know you were being funny, but the actual details of the upgrade are interesting. The actual software was uploaded to Curiosity during the flight to Mars and has been stored in the rover. During the cruise to Mars both the flight software for the cruise stage and EDL were upgraded and the software in the rover. The code that's going to be executed is now being taken out of storage and made into the main program overwriting the EDL software that's no longer needed.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-168

I think the purpose was less a joke and more along the lines of an extended metaphor. I agree that it is very interesting. I was hoping for somebody to make just the comment you did. Thanks.

But the question was meant to really spawn a general discussion around software release in general in a deep space environment. So anybody know how the next upgrade would take place, assuming Curiosity needs one? Would it be staged on the Mars Orbiter first? Relayed a frame at a time? Do the concepts of CI apply in deep space deployments? Why or why not?

This is a very exciting story about repairing a software issue on the Mars Spirit rover in 2004:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110719212649/http://www.planeta...

Shorter wikipedia version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_rover#Sol_18_.28January_...

Am I the only one visualizing a Lisp REPL into the rover right now?

No- some JPL engineers have thought of it too!

Here's an interesting history of Lisp as flight software at JPL:

http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

The more I hear about and see pictures of this "Curiosity Rover" the more I start to think it is just one big hoax, how can one really find out if this isn't really fake ?

the images look really "earthy" to me and it looks very similar to what they did with the "Moon Landing" and "Voyager Recording"

I'm not an expert but perhaps some expert can give us some insights on this ?