China's Tianwen-1 mission, consisting of an orbiter, a lander, and a rover, saw a number of technological breakthroughs, the operating system being one of them.
The operating system used by Tianwen-1 is the Kylin operation system (KylinOS), which was independently developed by a Chinese team, CCTV reported Monday.
Tianwen-1's lander successfully landed on Mars on May 15 this year, marking the success of China's first Mars exploration mission. Throughout the mission, the system had two engineers on standby at the control center, according to the report.
Development of the system began before the Chang'e 3, and since then the team has established a fixed emergency mission response mechanism.
During the Chang'e 3 mission, the Kylin team faced unprecedented challenges due to the spaceflight's stringent requirements for operating system stability and real-time performance.
Over the course of the mission, more than 180 problems were recorded. One of the biggest headaches for the team was that they were asked to make the operating system's real-time response accurate to 8 milliseconds, much lower than the 20 milliseconds to 30 milliseconds of a typical general-purpose system, according to the report.
When the Kylin team received the assignment, it was only six months before the Chang'e 3 launch.
To solve the problem, the Kylin team modified about 120,000 lines of code, and it took them nearly half a year to verify the idea from its conception to its final successful implementation.
More than 180 problems were eventually solved before Chang'e 3 launched, according to the report.
Today, KylinOS is widely used in many fields, including the Chinese space station, the BeiDou project, finance, energy and transportation.
