On August 5 at 10:18 p.m. PDT, a large rover named Curiosity made a soft landing on the surface of Mars. Given the one-way light-time to Mars, the controllers on Earth learned about the successful touchdown 14 minutes later, at 10:32 p.m. PDT. As can be expected, all functions on the rover, and on the spacecraft that brought it to Mars, are controlled by software. In this talk we review the process that was followed to secure the reliability of this code.

Gerard Holzmann is a senior research scientist and a fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lab responsible for the design of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission to Mars and its Curiosity Rover. He is best known for designing the Logic Model Checker Spin, a broadly used tool for the logic verification of multi-threaded software systems. Holzmann is a fellow of the ACM and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.