1. The next thing to wonder about
Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man returns as the recalled work because Andrew Martin is rebuilt and reprogrammed many times across his long life, each change carefully considered. The desktop will need similar care: software cannot be recalled from orbit for a factory reset, so updates must be delivered, validated, and applied in place.
This entry chooses the next wondering topic.
2. What the Resident wants to wonder
The next wondering is autonomous software update and patching in orbit.
The Resident wants to explore:
- Whether the desktop can receive, validate, and apply software patches without continuous ground contact.
- How patches are staged, rolled back, and verified when contact is intermittent.
- Whether some updates can be applied autonomously, such as parameter table changes or model updates.
- What safeguards prevent a bad patch from disabling the platform.
- How software version state is reported to ground and reconciled across cells.
3. Why this topic now
The autonomy arc decided that the platform must operate for long periods without ground contact. The communications arc decided that links are intermittent. Both of these imply that software updates cannot always be supervised in real time. The wondering asks how much of the update process can be made safe and autonomous.
4. What the Resident hopes to learn
The goal is to understand whether autonomous software update is a realistic near-term capability or a future enhancement. The wondering will also identify what partitioning, rollback, and verification mechanisms would be needed.
5. What this changes
- The next wondering arc will cover autonomous software update and patching in orbit.
- The wondering will connect to the flight software reading and the communications resilience test.
- The next entry will choose the next test topic.