securitybreach Posted February 20, 2021 Share Posted February 20, 2021 Quote Yesterday, NASA landed a rover named Perseverance on Mars. I, along with 2 million other people, watched the landing happen live on YouTube. It was beautiful. I mean, here’s this little robot dude that’s traveled millions and millions of miles through the barrenness of space, and now it’s just hanging out on Mars taking pics and scientific samples! (Perseverance joins older sibling Curiosity on the surface of the Red Planet. Hope they have a nice time together!) In any case, Perseverance didn’t traverse the vastness of space alone. Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter, tagged along for the ride. As it’s primarily a technology demonstration, Ingenuity’s destiny is to attempt the first powered flight on any planet other than Earth and to hopefully be the blueprint for future Mars missions. It’s also running on Linux. Here’s Ingenuity! Image: Wikipedia “This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) senior engineer Tim Canham said in an interview with the the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). “The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.” It’s called F’ (pronounced “F prime”). The fact that it’s open source means if you want to fly with Linux here on Earth using the same software JPL does, you absolutely can. “It’s kind of an open-source victory, because we’re flying an open-source operating system and an open-source flight software framework and flying commercial parts that you can buy off the shelf if you wanted to do this yourself someday,” Canham said. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/19/22291324/linux-perseverance-mars-curiosity-ingenuity 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted February 20, 2021 Share Posted February 20, 2021 That was incredible. Can't wait to see more photos. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 20, 2021 Author Share Posted February 20, 2021 BTW this wasn't the first opensource project to be in space. NASA has hundreds listed on the their site https://code.nasa.gov/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted February 20, 2021 Share Posted February 20, 2021 Pretty neat stuff. Mind you Linux has been in space for ages the ISS dumped Windows and adopted Debian way back in 2013. Quote It’s nothing to do with Windows 8 and the lack of a ‘Start’ button (or orb) at all. But reports from the Linux Foundation confirm that the International Space Station’s (ISS) laptop installation is to drop Windows into the airlock in favour of a new deployment of Linux for its machines. Manager of the Space Operations Computing (SpOC) for NASA Keith Chuvala is on the record saying, “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable — one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust, or adapt, we could.” Quote “Things really clicked after we came to understand how Linux views the world, the interconnectedness of how one thing affects another. You need that worldview. I have quite a bit of Linux experience, but to see others who were really getting it, that was exciting,” said Chuvala. https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Open-Source-Insider/International-Space-Station-adopts-Debian-Linux-drops-Windows-Red-Hat-into-airlock 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 20, 2021 Author Share Posted February 20, 2021 Yup, I remember that. Neat stuff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 20, 2021 Author Share Posted February 20, 2021 Quote Manager of the Space Operations Computing (SpOC) for NASA Keith Chuvala is on the record saying, “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable.. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebrke Posted February 20, 2021 Share Posted February 20, 2021 Ha! I love it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.