Mars Pathfinder

21 years, I think.

Sojourner and Pathfinder, which was a... looked like a toy compared to these landers.

It wasn't until 1997 that we returned to Mars on the US side

with Pathfinder.

And that's sort of the Viking disappointment effect in a large sense.

Of course, Carl and many others wanted to follow up.

onwards.

And there have been a couple of static landers in the meantime, haven't there? But the direction really has been for rovers.

My next hack is a great write-up about real-time operating systems from Vivek Bhagaria/Nerdy Electronics.

His case study here is the Mars Pathfinder robot, which landed on Mars and had some software bugs.

What in particular is an interesting deep dive into real-time operating systems? And to understand real-time operating systems, you have to understand that running multiple things on one CPU/microcontroller is always a lie.

You can't run multiple threads at the same time.

Okay, now you go.

Okay, now you go." And so that's the scheduling problem, but there's also another problem if you're interfacing with hardware, and that is which thread gets access to which resources at any given time.

And one way to handle that is with, like, semaphores or mutexes or whatever, and you say, "Okay, now this subroutine can use the communications bus." And then when it's done, it says, "Okay, I'm done." And then another one raises their flag and says, "Okay, now I'm using the communications bus." The problem that happened on Mars Pathfinder was that these two systems overlapped in just the wrong way in the VxWorks RTOS that it had on board.

And in particular, it had a priority queue, so it had some, you know, geology experiments that were long-running but low-priority, and then it had some kind of system tasks and then some immediate system tasks.

He was executed the next day.

In 1997, scientists reported that NASA's Mars Pathfinder had yielded what could be the strong evidence yet that Mars might once have been hospitable to life.

In 2002, a federal judge approved President George W. Bush's request to reopen West Coast ports, ending a 10-day labor lockout that was costing the U.S. economy an estimated $1 billion to $2 billion a day.

In 2005, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake on the Pakistan-India border killed an estimated 86,000 people.

Wow.

And let's see, what else do we have? It was in 1997, scientists reported the Mars Pathfinder, one of the rovers, I think it was our first rover, had yielded what could be the strongest evidence yet that Mars had once had been a hospitable, place for life to live and let's see what else we have I think that's about it as far as that goes so and let's see in Major League Baseball it's all over for the Yankees they lost last night folks The Rays swept them three games to nothing.

They lost last night 4-3, so they're not going to the next, to the league championships.

I guess the Rays will either be playing, let's see, the Guardians or White Sox as far as that goes.

President Clinton charged NASA with exploring Mars further.

Later that year, the Mars Global Surveyor mission launched, and in 1997, NASA's Mars Pathfinder landed on the Red Planet.

And while those missions were already underway, the publicity from the debunked findings no doubt propelled the search for life into a new era.

People still walk around remembering this...