New answers tagged interplanetary
6
The icy moons are of interest for exploration as part of the overall "follow the water" strategy of exploration that NASA (and others) have been exploring for some time. The "where else can water be found" is a major question in e.g. the US Planetary Science Decadal Survey (which is a community-driven consensus document which outlines the questions of ...
2
The motivation is the growing understanding, from the Voyager, Galileo and Cassini probes, that these icy moons (I'd throw in Enceladus) are geologically active with sub-surface oceans of liquid water, along with the realization (from studying the Earth's ocean vents and deep biosphere) that life can be sustained from the energy of geologic processes, not ...
4
Filo has covered operating systems, so I won't repeat that here (except to reference this answer about New Horizons' OS, which is Nucleus RTOS rather than VxWorks, by way of a change).
As for programming languages, there's inevitably a lot of C and C++, though there's a chance that a somewhat restricted subset of the languages is used to improve safety, ...
2
Example 1 : RTEMS, source https://devel.rtems.org/wiki/TBR/Website/Wheres_RTEMS
Example 2: VxWorks, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VxWorks#Aerospace_and_defense
3
I'm not quite sure what the documentary you saw was referring to in particular, but it seems likely that Galina Balashova's design work in the Soviet space program is relevant.
From the article:
Notably, she integrated a lack of gravity into her design, choosing dark colors for the floor and bright colors for the ceiling. There was an important ...
0
It certainly 'could', there is nothing making it physically impossible, though it would require a robust docking mechanism since the the tension forces hanging 120 tonnes at the target G force would be more substantial than just docking for fuel but not insurmountable, something less than 25mm cross section in steel and it would be connecting the engine ...
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