Daily mission report

Write the codeMedium 2 stages

At the end of every day, the outgoing shift leaves a report for the incoming one: each subsystem, its status, its alerts and how much of the day it was up. People read it on a screen in a fixed-width font. The engineering office wants the same numbers as a spreadsheet.

Produce both from the same data.

Print the report, WIDTH characters wide: the title and the mission line centred between two rules of =, the column headings, a row per subsystem and a totals line with the alerts added up and the average uptime:

==========================================
           DAILY MISSION REPORT           
           Lumen-3 · 2026-11-05           
==========================================
Subsystem   Status       Alerts     Uptime
------------------------------------------
POWER       OK                3     99.80%
GNC         WARN              2     97.25%
PROP        OK                0    100.00%
COMMS       DEGRADED          2     94.60%
THERM       OK                0     99.95%
------------------------------------------
Total                         7     98.32%

The columns are 12, 12, 7 and 11 characters wide: {row['subsystem']:<12} pads on the right, {row['alerts']:>7} on the left, and {value:>10.2f}% gives two decimal places and the sign. "text".center(WIDTH) centres a line.

The report

Finish stage 1 to unlock this stage.

Save the same rows to report.csv with csv.DictWriter: a header row with the four keys, then one row per subsystem. After the report, print an empty line, the saved line, and the file as it was written:

Saved report.csv:
subsystem,status,alerts,uptime_pct
POWER,OK,3,99.8
GNC,WARN,2,97.25
PROP,OK,0,100.0
COMMS,DEGRADED,2,94.6
THERM,OK,0,99.95

Open the file with newline=""; writeheader() writes the keys and writerows(rows) all the rows. The hidden tests delete the file, run your program again and read what it writes.

Report and file

report.csv

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Hints

Text Formatting with f-strings

text-formatting-f-strings.py

# F-strings - modern text formatting
astronaut = "John Smith"
mission = "Mars Explorer"
days_in_space = 180

print(f"Astronaut: {astronaut}")
print(f"Mission: {mission}")
print(f"Duration: {days_in_space} days")

# We can also do calculations
print(f"That is {days_in_space / 30:.1f} months")

Open the full example

script.py

PythonLn 1, Col 1Spaces: 4

Loading the Python environment…

Command-line arguments (sys.argv)

Separate arguments with commas. They're passed on every Run as sys.argv[1:].