Keynote Abstracts

摘要

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 just completed its fourth year on Mars, and with 15 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 single 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.