This week at the IEEE RealTime
Systems Symposium I heard a fascinating keynote address by David Wilner, Chief
Technical Officer of Wind River Systems. Wind River makes VxWorks, the realtime embedded systems kernel that was used in the Mars Pathfinder mission. In his talk, he explained in detail the actual software problems that caused the total system resets of the Pathfinder spacecraft, how they were diagnosed, and how they were solved. I wanted to share his story with each of you.