Telecom Lead America: Wind River, a provider of embedded
and mobile software, announced that the Mars Science Laboratory rover
Curiosity, which landed on Mars, is powered by Wind River technology.
The company said that Curiosity is running on Wind
River’s real-time operating system (RTOS), VxWorks.
Curiosity will investigate whether Mars has ever offered
environmental conditions favorable for microbial life, and assess Mars’
habitability for future human exploration.
Wind River claims that VxWorks plays a central role in
this operation by providing the core operating system for the spacecraft
control system from the second the rocket left Earth on November 26, 2011,
until completion of the mission.
Curiosity relied on VxWorks for the complex landing
sequence called EDL (entry, descent and landing), which is being described as
seven minutes of terror” due to the absolute precision required for the
spacecraft to survive the landing.
Speaking on this achievement, Ken Klein, president at
Wind River said that Wind River’s reliable and secure software has served as a
key foundational technology for aerospace organizations globally, and the
company is extremely proud to continue legacy as a technology provider for NASA
JPL’s space programs.
The company said that Curiosity will depend on VxWorks to
perform mission-critical tasks, such as ground operations control, data
collection, and Mars-to-Earth communication relay.
Digi International and Wind River announce M2M collaboration
In March this year, Digi International and Wind
River announced that they will deliver cloud-connected wireless
machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions.
