European Space Agency (ESA) engineers have updated the software on Mars Express orbiting Red
New software update"will allow it to see the water beneath the surface of Mars and its moon Phobos in more detail than ever before," ESA says. The agency originally launched Mars Express in 2003 as its first mission to the Red Planet.
MARSIS uses low frequency radio waves,reflecting off the surface of Mars to search for water and study the atmosphere of the Red Planet. The instrument's 40-meter antenna is capable of searching up to 5 km below the Martian surface, and software upgrades will improve signal reception and on-board data processing to improve the quality of data sent back to Earth.
"We faced a number of problems in order toimprove the performance of MARSIS", – explains Carlo Nenna, a software engineer at Enginium who is helping ESA with the modernization. "Not least because the MARSIS software was originally developed over 20 years ago using a Microsoft Windows 98 based development environment!"