This is a blog post about firmware updates, and I was inspired to write it by the news that NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars has got an OTA update. The firmware image was about 21MB and took 11 days to send it over-the-air (or in this case, over-the-vacuum: Mars is currently 242 million kilometres from Earth). NASA has long included OTA update capabilities in space missions: the Voyager probes upgraded with new algorithms long after they launched, including newly-invented bit encoders to incr...
