congratulations to Indian dost

[K Leo]

for the wonderful achievement with Mangalyaan!

With a budget less than a Hollywood movie, I bet they must have largely
used (and supported?) open sources - Julia included?

[Stefan Karpinski]

I have no idea what this is about. Can you clarify?

[John Myles White]

I think this is the flight to Mars that India just finsihed.

 — John

[Stefan Karpinski]

Is there any evidence that Julia was used to accomplish that?

[John Myles White]

Not that I’m aware of. I’d say the thread is probably off-topic.

 — John

[Tim Holy]

Seems wildly unlikely. The lead time and certification hoops for software that
has to run successfully a quarter-billion kilometers from earth are, well, out
of this world.

"Sorry, sir, but our Mars probe crashed. It's a complete loss."

"Oh no! Why?"

"Well, just before it was about to dock, Tim Holy tagged a new version of
Images. Turns out it had a bug in it that prevented the cameras from saving
images to disk. So we were flying blind. We tried rolling back to an earlier
version, but recent changes to Pkg meant that `pin` wasn't working either. So
we hit the planet."

"Next time, don't run master."

--Tim

[John Myles White]

I should have known that Tim Holy is the real Ghost of Mars.

— John

[Isaiah Norton]

Since we're off the ranch anyway, the brochure is a neat read:

http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25/pdf/pslv-c25-brochure.pdf

(the MAR1750 processor is a 16-bit ISA from 1980, implemented in a radiation-hardened package and widely used for spacecraft control)

[Viral Shah]

Government research organizations in India often use open source software just like everywhere else, where applicable. I am pretty sure that there was no Julia usage given that the mission would have been planned and its software was developed when Julia had barely been around.

-viral

[Francesco Bonazzi]

On Wednesday, September 24, 2014 5:44:42 PM UTC+2, Isaiah wrote:

Since we're off the ranch anyway, the brochure is a neat read:

http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25/pdf/pslv-c25-brochure.pdf

(the MAR1750 processor is a 16-bit ISA from 1980, implemented in a radiation-hardened package and widely used for spacecraft control)

Consider that probes outside of the Earth magnetic field are heavily exposed to cosmic rays, much more than low orbit satellites. I guess they need to build custom hardware to resist that and programming is probably low level.

[Michele Zaffalon]

Tim Holy: I had hoped you learnt to be more careful with untested versions. See what happened this time around: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/20/bad-day-for-space-probes-one-lost-on-mars-another-in-safe-mode-at-jupiter?

[Tim Holy]

Don't look at me, I swear it was just a simple change in the return type of a function---they should have used a parametric type definition. Another $1billion down the drain...

Best,

--Tim