Underappreciated OS, that one.
It stands to reason that any sufficiently expensive piece of scientific/industrial/medical equipment is likely to outlive the service life of the computer you need to run it, to say nothing of the company responsible. You'd think people would be wise to this by now, but I suppose the people buying Shiny! New! equipment aren't the ones tasked with keeping that ancient Solaris box running so the telescope doesn't get bricked.
Not that there's much you can do about it. Open source helps, but that only gets you so far.
On a related note, MS finally gave up on Windows CE this year...