The Ingenuity helicopter, which has been fluttering around the red planet for almost three years now, fell out of contact with Perseverance, the rover that brought it to the planet (and that it communicates with using Zigbee!). NASA wrote yesterday that the flight, its 72nd, was a test of its systems after it was forced to land it early during its previous flight. The agency is working toward reestablishing contact. While we wait, here’s a recent video of the helicopter in action.
…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
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.
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.
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
Reboot mid flight is a funny solution
Imagine telling an airline pilot to just reboot the whole plane if something goes wrong.
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.
Planes running windows?
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.
“Tower, we have some problems”
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
You’d be surprised. We only do that on the ground, though.