Hogy? Hát így:
Dr. Holzmann described the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, known popularly as "Curiousity", as "basically a computer with very strange periphereals that has to do something that’s never been done before".
MSL is part of a two-year, $2.5 billion mission investigating had microbial life existed on Mars. MSL is about the size of a small car and is the largest thing we’ve ever flown to Mars. It weighs 330 kg (730 pounds) on Mars and about twice that on Earth.
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The heart of MSL is 3.8 million lines of software, equivalent to 60,000 pages of text, or 100 really large books (like Encyclopedia Britannica). This is about 6 times more code than was flown on the last mission, and is more than all the previous missions to Mars combined.
How do you make sure it all works without being able to practice it? For example, the landing (thruster-powered flight) has never been done before and cannot be tested in Earth’s gravity.
