“We need to take a whole series of steps to make that software active,” said Steve Scandore, a senior flight software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “You have to imagine that if something goes wrong with this, it could be the last time you hear from the rover.”

via NASA upgrades Mars Curiosity software … from 350M miles away – Computerworld.

Curiosity, while working on Mars alone, needs to be told what it will do every day — move across the bottom of the crater, zap a rock with its laser, scoop up a soil sample. And once a team of NASA scientists make the daily decision as to what the rover will do, programmers have to begin furiously working on up to a 1,000 different commands that will be uploaded to the rover.