Mars helicopter mission (which Apache says is powered byLog4j) overcomes separate network glitch to confirm new flight record NASA has revealed that Ingenuity – the experimental helicopter sent to Mars with the Perseverance Rover – has clocked up a whole half-hour of flight in the Red Planet's meanly thin atmosphere. The 'copter passed the thirty-minute mark during its 17th flight, on December 5, which sets a new record for the space agency. But …
They do have a space internet running, with TCP/IP optimized for the crazy long round trip times, but it's safe as long as the Chinese, Iranian, Russians, Norks, 4channers, or other purely malicious trolls can't get at it. China might not bother since there's not much IP they could gain from hacking Ingenuity, but Russia would do it from pure spite since destroying nice things (like the ISS) is all they can do now.
Of course someone's computer at JWP is probably on both Worst Internet (our normal internet) and Space Internet, so I sure hope they have things firewalled well and there's nowhere for the jndi query to go.
At least the rover is running VxWorks, so that's pretty solid.
Is it just the media, including El Reg that thinks it's "cute" to quote these tweets or does NASA not have twitter feeds for adults any more? All we seem to get these days are the tweets from the feed aimed at 12 year olds and younger.
"All we seem to get these days are the tweets from the feed aimed at 12 year olds and younger."
Given the development time and life endurance of space projects - then you need to get the next generations interested. The biographies of eminent science people often mention an epiphany when they were still quite young.
Was reading an article last week about how the Voyagers 1 and 2 had discovered after leaving the solar system, that the density of space was increasing the further out they got. This was unexpected, and reasons were given why this might be the case, but it's unknown if this is simply the bow wave of the solar system as it were, as it travels round the galaxy or if the atmosphere will keep getting thicker all the way into another discovery.
If it keeps up, we may end up swimming to Alpha Centauri! :p
If nothing else, it certainly decreases the chances of travelling through space at any significant proportion of the speed of light without some very heavy bow shielding. Not only is space not empty, it may be even less empty than we thought :-)
Has shown that we can use a production version of such a machine to scout ahead of rovers thus radically improving visibility for them and enabling them to go further, faster and in more useful directions.
Sadly in your dismal grey universe none of that has purpose since no exploration of Mars has any purpose because you are dismal grey human and all is dismal grey wasteland for you. Sad.
It’s produced physical results than can be compared against models, predictions and estimates of the astrophysics required to fly in the thin Martian atmosphere. Now they have hard data from a concept vehicle, they can plan a much more useful and capable vehicle that will hopefully become as useful as the rovers Spirit and Opportunity became over their long lives.
"The probe used multiple SQL injections but I've yet to find any compromised files"
One of the reasons Ingenuity was so cheap was that it used lots of standard software and hardware (is pretty much a phone inside I think). Making it cheap (and light, but needs to be light anyway) is what enabled them to get it to Mars. They can do that because if it failed it did not matter: it was and is a demonstrator: simply working was the goal, any science was not intended and would be a bonus. They knew the risks: going through all the millions of lines of code (log4j is tiny fraction: entire Linux kernel in there, many video processing libraries, many many things) would have made it so expensive they could not have gone.
Perseverance is ... different. It's not using log4j.
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A colleague wrote a diagnostic for a condition on the live mainframe. He knew that it would occasionally print a false error message on the operator's console if it hit a "one in a million" limit condition in his logic.
He forgot that his code was being obeyed so often that "one in a million" happened every few minutes - to great annoyance of the operators.
It seems to me that the "Ingenuity" people could have used off-the-shelf components (of course not the rotor blades and motors) for tracking, imaging, and more. The intelligence and control of, for example, the DJI stuff is amazing, and the quality of imaging is far better than what I have seen from the Mars copter. Sad.
Wouldnt the native system loggers be the better option for logging rather than java-based app loggers? Especially for embedded systems? So you just tell the app to handover output to the system and let the system write/process the logs using its builtin or native tools?
It is correct Jet Propulsion Labs earlier this year attributed many Open Source developers for their contributions to the (succesful) Ingenuity Mars Helicopter project.
JPL recently released the flight control system on board Ingenuity as open source (fprime, or F´) which is written in Python and C++, including the flight control log system (it will build on several systems, also on ARM Linux for Raspberry pi and (obvious) the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor on board).
The fprime source code include an example module for attaching and communicating with a GPS receiver on the Raspberry, so probably the flight control system also is in charge off sensors on board the helicopter (inclinometer, altimeter, cameras).
There is of course a supporting Linux operating system, I guess very basic, where common sense would imply running a Java dependent Apache server on a "mobile phone" just for logging would be "overkill".
The Log4j vulnerability may be found in another place of the Ingenuity Linux ecosystem than on board - or I may be wrong :)
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