Windows 98 was released on June 25, 1998 and was generally considered a good operating system, in fact I was lucky enough to test it on my veteran Pentium 133 at the time and the truth is that I have good memories. The fact is that this operating system was not only installed on consumer computers, it was also used on large space missionsand some of them are still active.

This is the case with the Mars Express probe, which was launched into space 19 years ago and that he has since worked to learn in more detail the important aspects of Mars and Phobos, including the surface and subsurface, atmosphere, and environmental conditions of both. It has various scientific tools for this and uses Windows 98 as its operating system.

As you may have guessed, all the software related to this mission is based on Windows 98 and has been in need of an update for some time, which is easier said than done because we are talking about update a spacecraft that has been using an operating system from 24 years ago, and it’s on Mars.

Complicated, but not impossible, because ESA (“European Space Agency”) has been able to develop new software that will bring important improvements, including e.g. improving signal reception and data processing on boardtwo keys that should increase the sending of data to Earth and a significant leap in their quality.

How do you upgrade Windows 98 in space?

In order to face the previous phase of new software development, a virtual machine based on VirtualBox was used, ie. the development was not performed on a native system. This is understandable, especially in terms of cost and efficiency

Carlo Nenna, MARSIS onboard software engineer at Enginium and one of the main people responsible for this project, noted that it was very difficult to find a way to share files between host and host computers, and that installing common things like a web browser that works or also the source code editor it was terribly complicatedso much so that they only fully configured and validated the development environment they needed two months.

It is surprising to see that the spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars for so many years, uses an operating system from 24 years ago, but the truth is that The world is full of amazing things that rely on old software or hardware. Take, for example, that the Boeing 747 receives critical updates via floppy disks, and that until 2019, the US nuclear weapons system also relied on this storage medium.