Case Study: NASA JPL lands Curiosity safely on Mars with Semmle

NASA JPL - Customer Case Study

NASA JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory behind many of NASA’s most important space missions, needed a way to catch mission-critical software defects before they could jeopardize spacecraft safety. During Curiosity’s journey to Mars, the team found a potentially catastrophic bug in the rover’s Entry, Descent and Landing software, and needed to determine whether similar issues existed elsewhere in the control code. To help address this challenge, NASA JPL worked with Semmle and its QL analysis platform.

Semmle produced a custom QL query in about 20 minutes, which NASA JPL ran across the Curiosity control software to find variants of the original bug. The analysis identified the original issue plus more than 30 additional variants, including three in the critical landing module, allowing the team to fix the problems and patch the firmware remotely before landing. As a result, Curiosity landed safely on Mars, and NASA JPL continues to use Semmle QL and LGTM to enforce coding standards and prevent future mission-threatening defects.

NASA JPL