UK space mission set for take-off

One of the UK's most challenging software development projects is set for its ultimate test next week when the Beagle 2 Mars Lander takes off from its launch pad in Kazakhstan.

On 2 June, the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft starts its mission to deliver the probe onto the surface of the planet around Christmas this year. The aim of the project is to search for evidence of life on Mars.

But Beagle 2 project leader Professor Colin Pillinger told Computing that the business world will benefit from the mission too.

'Everything in the space business can be applied in the commercial world - these things have got to work, you can't send someone up to fix it,' he said.

'For example, some of the software we will use to compress data to send back to Earth is commercially exploitable for sending pictures quickly over communication lines.'

UK supplier SciSys spent four years developing the multimillion pound software to support the lander when it starts its investigations after a 400 million kilometre journey.

The first communication sent back from Beagle 2 by the SciSys software will be a call sign composed by the rock band Blur.

But even while the probe is on the surface of Mars, software engineers will still be working to amend the systems to refine the experiments. Beagle 2 will only be able to communicate with mission control in for a few short sessions each day, transmitting data in bursts via the Mars Express orbiter.

'You can't do real time operations,' said Pillinger.

'We have to sit down and say - "what do we want to do tomorrow?" Everything is a challenge. The mission started from a blank sheet of paper and everything has to work. They are all single points of failure. If the software does something stupid and wrecks the system then it will be big red faces all around.'

The onboard software was developed using the ADA programming language and will run on a radiation-proof version of a Sparc ERC32 processor.