"It's not like doing a regular remote upgrade," he said. "We don't have a person on the other end. The vehicle is up there by itself. We can't interact with someone on the other end. We have no one we can ask to check something for us. We have to send code up and then wait."

And while this is a major software upgrade, Andy Mishkin, a mission leader with JPL, noted that he has a separate team of about 100 programmers who write commands for Curiosity every day.

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.

"We're writing a software program every day that has to run for the first time and tell the rover what to do," Mishkin said. "It keeps 100 people busy. It's like running a sprint every day to keep the rover productive and gathering science."

Scandore added that the programmers only get about a half a day to get the programming sequences written, tested and uploaded into space.