The Mars Express spacecraft is finally getting a Windows 98 upgrade

Image: European Space Agency

The European Space Agency's engineers are getting ready for a Windows 98 upgrade. The Mars Express has been operating for 19 years and the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding instrument onboard has been using Windows 98. It is good news for humanity and the Red Planet that the ESA isn't going to upgrade to Windows ME.

The discovery of a huge underground aquifer of liquid water on the Red Planet was made thanks to the MARSIS instrument. The new software will allow it to see beneath the surface of Mars and Phobos in more detail than before. The agency launched the Mars Express into space in 2003 in order to explore the Red Planet.

MARSIS uses radio waves to look for water and study the Red Planet's atmosphere. The 130 foot antenna on the instrument is capable of searching around three miles below the surface of Mars, and the software upgrade will improve signal reception and onboard data processing to improve the quality of data sent back to Earth.

Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Carlo Nenna is a software engineer who is helping with the upgrade of MARSIS. The MARSIS software is based on Microsoft Windows 98 and was originally designed over 20 years ago.

The technique used by the National Institute for Astrophysics and the European Space Agency to store high-resolution data on the MARSIS instrument fills up the onboard memory quickly. The new software will allow us to switch MARSIS on for five times as long and explore a larger area with each pass. The new software will allow us to study these regions in high resolution and confirm if they are home to new sources of water on Mars. It's very similar to having a brand new instrument on board Mars Express.

It is unlikely that the team has enabled TPM 2.0 in the bios in order to install Windows 11 on the MARSIS. Yes, right?