Which operating system is Perseverance running?

Question

A few days ago, I watched Perseverance being launched towards Mars.

I know that there is lots of very specific hardware embedded into the rover, so, very likely, there has been software written by NASA (or for NASA), to make measurements, communicate et cetera.

It would be very odd, to just have self-written software running this advanced technology - I guess there is some kind of operating system kernel being used to schedule tasks, manage resources and run all the software on the rover.

Which kind of kernel do they use? Is it some kind of RTOS or a Linux kernel?

Have a look at the answer to What software language was used to program the martian rovers Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity? — uhoh, Aug 02 '20 at 11:45
No clear answers to your question, but some relevant/helpful information is available in answers to Operating system of New Horizons spacecraft and Interplanetary spacecraft flight operating system and programming language and What software language was used to program the martian rovers Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity? and possibly Which operating systems is the International Space Station running? — uhoh, Aug 02 '20 at 12:02
@uhoh Those are certainly interesting - This thread on the software engineering stack exchange has just the kind of information I was asking for. However, I was not able to find any references to the new perseverance rover... after 9 years they may have changed a lot (if somebody knows what exactly, an answer would be amazing) ^^ — publicdomain, Aug 02 '20 at 12:09
I think there will be some good answers posted here. I'm no expert, but if I had to bet it would be that it's the same OS as Curiosity; the last thing in the world one would want to do when sending another very similar rover to Mars would be to send it with a new and unproven operating system! There's more (historical) information in answers to How did NASA remotely fix the code on the Mars Pathfinder? and How many memory banks does Opportunity have?. — uhoh, Aug 02 '20 at 12:21
These don't address this head on but they do give a feel for the kinds of problems that can happen and how hard it is to solve them hundreds of millions of miles away. btw thank you for linking to the SE SE thread; I had no idea this kind of thing was discussed there, now I'll never get any work done! — uhoh, Aug 02 '20 at 12:26

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 02 '20 at 13:11

11

It's running VxWorks, at least according to Wikipedia, and in fact there is a direct statement to this effect here (PDF link):

The M2020 flight software runs on the VxWorks operating system, and is written in C.

VxWorks is what pretty much all the US landers have run, and it's still, I think, the obvious choice: it's a very mature, very tested system.

answered Aug 02 '20 at 13:11

1

How about the UAE Rover and the Chinese one then? – Joe Jobs Aug 03 '20 at 17:43
2

@JoeJobs: no idea, sorry. Probably not VxWorks in the case of the Chinese one, anyway. – Aug 03 '20 at 17:49
Probably some different RTOS. – RAD6000 Aug 20 '20 at 13:49

Which operating system is Perseverance running?

1 Answers1