The software on ESA's Mars Express spacecraft is to be upgraded after nearly two decades, giving the orbiter capabilities to hunt for water beneath the planet and study its larger moon, Phobos.

Mars Express was launched on June 2, 2003, and was initially made up of two components: the Mars Express Orbiter and the Beagle 2 lander. Unfortunately, the lander failed to make contact with Earth after it was released and arrived at the surface of the Red Planet. It is presumed lost. The orbiter, however, is still working after 19 years in service, spinning around Mars.

Now, engineers at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), Italy, are revamping the spacecraft's software. The upgrade will allow the Mars Express Orbiter to continue searching for water locked beneath the Martian surface using its MARSIS radio-wave instrument and monitor the planet's closest satellite, Phobos, more efficiently. MARSIS is today operated by INAF and funded by the Italian Space Agency.

Specifically, according to ESA, the orbiter, which is millions of miles from Earth, will receive "a series of upgrades that improve signal reception and on-board data processing to increase the amount and quality of science data sent to Earth." It appears part of the update will streamline its processes and communications to reduce the information collected by the onboard sensors to just what's needed.

"Previously, to study the most important features on Mars, and to study its moon Phobos at all, we relied on a complex technique that stored a lot of high-resolution data and filled up the instrument's on-board memory very quickly," Andrea Cicchetti, the MARSIS deputy principal investigator and operation manager at INAF, leading the upgrade, explained in a statement.

"By discarding data that we don't need, the new software allows us to switch MARSIS on for five times as long and explore a much larger area with each pass."

Mars Express will thus continue to look for signs of water near the Martian South Pole at high resolutions. Colin Wilson, a scientist working on the mission, said the software was "like having a brand-new instrument on board…almost 20 years after launch."

"The MARSIS radar on-board software upgrade demonstrates that it is possible to renew an entire mission," Cicchetti told The Register in a statement.

"I am not surprised at all that such a mission is still in flight after 19 years. I [have been] working on it every day since its launch, and I am sure that Mars Express will give us the possibility to make many other discoveries in the coming years that will help us to better understand our planet."

Mars Express was ESA's first planetary mission, and is the second oldest active spacecraft orbiting a planet other than Earth. The oldest is NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey. Pushing new software to such an old orbiter after so long is challenging, according to Carlo Nenna, an engineer at Enginium, an Italian IT consulting firm helping to roll out the upgrade.

"We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS," he said. "Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!"

"The very old development environment (it was quite old already back in year 2000) required to set up a Windows 98 machine. I did this with a virtual machine in VirtualBox," he told The Register.

"Just finding a way to share files between host and guest machines was an hard task. Installing common things like a working web browser or a source code editor was difficult too. It took almost two months only to set up and fully validate the development environment."

The spacecraft carries seven instruments, including various cameras, spectrometers, and a radar altimeter to study Mars's atmosphere, climate, and geology. Mars Express was the first to spot signs of water ice and carbon dioxide ice on the planet, leading scientists to question whether it could have been habitable at some point. It also collected data that hinted at signs of methane, possibly forged in the hot furnace of volcanoes long ago.

Finally, the spacecraft orbiter has provided astronomers with some of the most detailed images of Phobos. The Martian moon is shaped like a potato, with an uneven, pockmarked surface unlike the Earth's round Moon. ®

Pondering what services to switch off to keep your laptop going just that bit longer? NASA engineers can relate, having decided the Mars InSight lander will go out on a high: they plan to burn through the remaining power to keep the science flowing until the bitter end.

The InSight lander is in a precarious position regarding power. A build-up of dust has meant the spacecraft's solar panels are no longer generating anywhere near enough power to keep the batteries charged. The result is an automatic shutdown of the payload, although there is a chance InSight might still be able to keep communicating until the end of the year.

Almost all of InSight's instruments have already been powered down, but the seismometer remains active and able to detect seismic activity on Mars (such as Marsquakes.) The seismometer was expected to be active until the end of June, at which point it too would be shut-down in order to eke out the lander's dwindling supply of power just a little longer.

The Mars Ingenuity helicopter is in need of a patch to work around a failed sensor before another flight can be attempted.

The helicopter's inclinometer failed during a recommissioning effort ahead of the 29th flight. The sensor is critical as it will reposition the craft nearer to the Perseverance rover for communication purposes.

Although not required during flight, the inclinometer (which consists of two accelerometers) is used to measure gravity prior to spin-up and takeoff. "The direction of the sensed gravity is used to determine how Ingenuity is oriented relative to the downward direction," said Håvard Grip, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter chief pilot.

Video On Friday NASA released footage of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flying further and faster than ever before.

The film recorded during Ingenuity's 25th flight on April 8 when it flew 704 meters at up to 5.5 meters per second.

In the sped-up footage shown below, the vehicle climbs to 10 meters, heads southwest, accelerates to max speed in under three seconds, and flies over Martian sand ripples and rock fields before landing on relatively flat terrain.

The Martian InSight lander will no longer be able to function within months as dust continues to pile up on its solar panels, starving it of energy, NASA reported on Tuesday.

Launched from Earth in 2018, the six-metre-wide machine's mission was sent to study the Red Planet below its surface. InSight is armed with a range of instruments, including a robotic arm, seismometer, and a soil temperature sensor. Astronomers figured the data would help them understand how the rocky cores of planets in the Solar System formed and evolved over time.

"InSight has transformed our understanding of the interiors of rocky planets and set the stage for future missions," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said in a statement. "We can apply what we've learned about Mars' inner structure to Earth, the Moon, Venus, and even rocky planets in other solar systems."

The long-lived Ingenuity helicopter has made contact with NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars after an unexpected communications blackout.

Ingenuity just passed the milestone of a year of operations on the Red Planet, after being designed for five experimental test flights over 30 Martian days during 2021. Thus far, the helicopter has managed to fly more than 4.2 miles in 28 sorties, proving NASA's reputation for over-engineering its space kit.

Ingenuity uses Perseverance as a base station to send data to and receive commands from Earth. Well, up until May 3, when communications between rover and helicopter dropped out. The problem? Dust, it turns out, which was stopping the helicopter from charging properly from its solar panels.

The joint ESA-Roscosmos Mars rover Rosalind Franklin is "very unlikely" to launch this year after Russia was hit with fresh economic sanctions for invading Ukraine.

Following a meeting with its 22 member states, the European Space Agency confirmed on Monday it was "fully implementing sanctions imposed on Russia."

"We deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of the war in Ukraine. We are giving absolute priority to taking proper decisions, not only for the sake of our workforce involved in the programmes, but in full respect of our European values, which have always fundamentally shaped our approach to international cooperation," ESA said. "Regarding the ExoMars programme continuation, the sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely."

Attempts to recover ESA's stricken Sentinel-1B satellite are continuing and one of the failure scenarios engineers are considering will be familiar to some of us: possible leakage of a ceramic capacitor.

The satellite, launched in 2016 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Arianespace facility at Kourou in French Guiana, remains under control. However, power problems have rendered its C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (C-SAR) instrument pretty much useless, thus defeating the point of the spacecraft.

Sister spacecraft, Sentinel-1A, has continued to collect data despite recently having to dodge some debris.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has slammed the brakes on its ExoMars rover, Rosalind Franklin.

According to an ESA insider, the agency today agreed to suspend the mission at its ruling council meeting in Paris.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has pulled back from yet more "cooperative activities" with Russia as the agency continues to adjust to life without its former partner.

It said yesterday that a "fundamental change of circumstances... make it impossible for ESA to implement the planned lunar cooperation."

ESA's ExoMars project was already put on hold last month as bosses ponder how to get the completed rover to the red planet without the Proton rocket they had expected to launch it on in September.

Feature The European Space Agency's (ESA) JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) spacecraft has kicked off electromagnetic testing in the Airbus Defence and Space cleanrooms in Toulouse.

The JUICE mission, which is due to launch on the very last Ariane 5 from French Guiana in April 2023, will spend nearly eight years cruising to Jupiter and a further three and a half years observing the Jupiter system. In 2034 it will become the first spacecraft to orbit a moon other than Earth's own satellite as it drops into orbit around Ganymede for some close-up science.

The Register visited Airbus's facility while the spacecraft was undergoing testing in the "quiet" room of the Toulouse site, the purpose being to check out any interference from the payload components. Visitors were therefore politely asked to surrender phones and anything that might interfere with the environment. We also had to wear protective gear to keep the spacecraft as squeaky clean as possible, although the end of the mission will see JUICE sent crashing into the surface of Ganymede to avoid any contamination reaching Europa.

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