ESA is finally updating Mars Express Windows 98-based software

The European Space Agency (ESA) has finally decided to give the Mars Express probe a software update. It's been running on a 20-year-old operating system all this time, and the organisation figured an update might increase its chance of discovering the secrets of the red planet.

Together with its friendly water probe, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS), the Mars Express' mission is to uncover secrets hidden under the surface of Mars, learning it's composition and the like. Most importantly its trying to find water and, by extension, life on Mars. It already has found water, but there's still more work to be done.

Our friends over at Tom's Hardware brought the news to our attention and pointed us to the ESA blog, where Carlo Nenna, the Enginium software engineer carrying out the upgrade notes that they “faced a number of challenges to improve the perfo