Wind River Blog Network

The Space Flight Software '08 workshop

By Mike Deliman

The Space Flight Software '08  workshop in Maryland was really nice. It was a great chance to meet several folks I've worked with over the last few decades, mostly as voices over the phone, and meet some folks new to me and the industry.  The theme of the workshop was to share lessons learned and ideas used to make our missions more robust and reliable, more efficient, and reduce cost where possible.   The idea is not only to test new technologies and integrate successful ideas with existing work, but to also maximize relevant data return on science objectives. 

As might be expected, there was a lot of chatter about space projects, upcoming manned rocket development, recent discoveries in deep space, and success of various recent and ongoing missions.  Congratulations to the Phoenix Mars Polar Lander team, by the way, on the successful completion of your mission!

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Security

By Alex Wilson

I have just attended The Open Group meeting in Munich. The Open Group look after standards such as POSIX and as such Wind River are a member of the Real Time and Embedded Systems Forum.

This week as part of the Real Time Group we were looking at "Dependability through Assuredness" and had some great presentations on formal methods and security. We (or rather my boss Rob Hoffman) presented on the MILS architecture. If you want to see a demo of this technology then visit MILCOM 2008

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Commercial Unmanned Vehicles

By Alex Wilson

Well, it's been some time since my last blog - I guess I suffered from a severe case of blogger's block :-)

What prompted me to blog today was my experience flying home from Amsterdam this week, and an unusual news story.

As usual I started to doze as the aircraft taxied out to the runway, but as we started to take off the usual acceleration was halted followed by braking and air brakes coming up on the wings. We then turned around and headed back to the taxi way....

Pilot informed us they had a "technical problem" which was followed by the usual 2 hour delay and changing aircraft before setting off for home again. Turned out one of a dual redundant indicator in the cockpit shows and engine over temperature fault and the technician would not sign off the aircraft as safe to fly. I don't mind this as safety in flying is paramount - although I did regret paying for getting an earlier flight!

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But Not A Drop To Drink...

By Mike Deliman

Congratulations are due to the Mars Phoenix Lander crew.
Not only did their mission get it's extension, they found the first part of what they were looking for.

They've confirmed the presence of that illusive substance, so critical to life on Earth: WATER!
Remember, everywhere we find water on Earth, we find something living in it.

Here's the announcement from NASA.  Enjoy!

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Wind River Webinar: Q and A

By Mike Deliman

Hello All,

last week as some of you know I was the featured presenter / presentation for a Webinar. (you may have problems watching that with firefox...) .  During the course of the webinar, we were asked a number of questions, and we ran out of time...

Here are some of the questions and answers we couldn't get to.

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Farnborough Air Show 2008

By Paul Parkinson

Earlier this week, I attended the 2008 Farnborough Air Show, one of the highlights of the aerospace industry's calendar. I spent quite a lot of time visiting some of our partners and customers on their exhibition stands, as I'm interested in seeing how Wind River's technologies are used in the end applications. It was also a good opportunity to catch up with contacts and find out more about the progrress of current developments and new programmes. Whilst walking around the exhibition, I couldn't help but notice two significant differences compared to the previous event: an increased focus on unmanned systems and also on carbon footprint reduction.

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Astute optronic mast case study

By Paul Parkinson

I don't often have the opportunity to discuss how Wind River's Aerospace and Defence customers are using our technologies in their applications due to security restrictions and commercial confidentiality.

So, I am very grateful to Thales for allowing us to announce that they have used VxWorks for their latest generation optronic mast which is being used on the UK Royal Navy's Astute class submarines.

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Rhapsody && Coverage Analysis

By Paul Parkinson

I've recently been working with a customer to integrate Wind River Coverage Analysis (formerly known as CoverageScope) with Telelogic Rhapsody within their development tools framework for a mission-critical system.

At first glance, it might seem strange to integrate a code coverage testing tool with a UML design tool, as these aren't even adjacent phases in the software development life cycle (implementation being between them). However, the advent of Eclipse in recent years has helped to break down the silos which used to confine tools individual development life cycle stages and improved development work flow.

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"Did you watch it?"

By Mike Deliman

Did I watch it?

I've been asked about a dozen times since Phoenix landed if I watched the landing.

Coverage was available, after all, on NASA-TV (both satellite and web feeds), and the Science Channel ran Mars footage all night, including covering the NASA TV feed.  I've worked on a lot of Mars Stuff, and indeed Phoenix runs VxWorks 5.2 for Rad6000, a direct product of a handful of folks at Loral & JPL, and us 3 chickens at WRS (Brian, Lisa and I; I  was the most-junior member of the engineering team).

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Congratulations!

By Mike Deliman

Congratulations to the Mars Phoenix Lander team on successfully landing Phoenix in the arctic region of Mars.  Well Done!!

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