Technology

59669 readers

3115 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

222

NASA lost contact with its Mars helicopter (www.theverge.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Especially considering the use of off-the-shelf Snapdragon 801.

There's some nice discussion about Ingenuity here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26177619

...This processor will have not flips on Mars, possibly up to every few minutes. Their solution is to hold two copies of memory and double check operations as much as possible, and if any difference is detected they simply reboot. Ingenuity will start to fall out of the sky, but it can go through a full reboot and come back online in a few hundred milliseconds to continue flying.
-jhurliman

[–] httpjames 52 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Reboot mid flight is a funny solution

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Imagine telling an airline pilot to just reboot the whole plane if something goes wrong.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

During a flight is a bit much, but some aircraft have a reboot between flights as a standard procedure to fix glitches that would happen if the plane was left on for the entire time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Planes running windows?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Nothing that high level. Different systems are running independently, some may be redundant to each other in case one fails. But run something long enough especially in extreme conditions and things can drift from the baselines. If a power off and on regularly prevents that it's a lot easier than trying to chase down gremlins that could be different each time they pop up for different reasons.

Even NASA I believe has done such resets from Apollo through the unmanned probes from time to time. Mentioning Windows, the newest versions don't really do this baseline reset if you just shut them down, even if you disable the hibernate/sleep modes, while a restart does.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

"Tower, we have some problems"
"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

You'd be surprised. We only do that on the ground, though.