Linux and open-source have reached Mars

The έφτασε την ατμόσφαιρα του Άρη με ταχύτητα 19.000 χιλιόμετρα την ώρα και επτά λεπτά αργότερα, η NASA προσγείωσε απαλά και με her last rover.

A one-tone mobile lab and its tiny companion, the Ingenuity drone helicopter. If all goes well, the 1,8 kg Ingenuity will be the first vehicle to ever fly to another world.

11 minutes light years from Earth, no one will fly Ingenuity with a controller . It will fly using a combination of Linux and a NASA (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) program based on the open-source F´ (pronounced F prime) framework.

This will not be easy. No one has ever tried to fly to Mars, which has an atmosphere of only one centimeter of the Earth's air density.

Mars also has only a third of the Earth's gravity, and Ingenuity engineers will be happy if the drone just gets off the ground.

Ingenuity is purely a technological experiment. It is not designed to support Perseverance's mission, which is to search for signs ς ζωής, και η συλλογή δειγμάτων από βράχους και χώμα για μεταγενέστερες αποστολές μετά την επιστροφή στη Γη. Η αποστολή του Ingenuity είναι να αποδείξει ότι είναι πιθανή η πτήση στον Άρη χρησιμοποιώντας εμπορικό υλικό off-the-shelf (COTS) και open source.

In one interview of the IEEE , Timothy Canham, JPL Embedded Flight Software Engineer, explained that the helicopter's processor board is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 operating at 500 Hz, not MegaHertz, Hertz.

While this may sound very slow to you, it is much faster than Perseverance's processors. This is because NASA's processors and chips must meet standards NASA's Spaceflight Computing (HPSC).

These custom processors take years of design work and testing before being certified for spaceflight. For example, NASA's newest general-purpose processor is a variant of ARM A53 that you may be familiar with from the Raspberry Pi 3. Ingenuity, however, as a demonstration project can use a much more common and therefore more modern CPU.

Canham states, “we literally ordered parts from SparkFun []. It's commercial hardware, we'll test it and if it works well, we'll use it.”

As for the software, Canham said,

This is the first time we will fly Linux to Mars. We actually work with Linux system. The software framework we use is the one we developed at JPL for CubeSats and instruments, and we acquired it a few years ago. So you can have the software framework that flies a helicopter to Mars and use it in your own project. It's kind of a win for open source because we're throwing out an open source operating system and an open source flight software framework, with commercial parts that you can buy off the shelf if you want to do it yourself one day.

This open source software is F´. It is a framework that allows the rapid development of space flight software. F´ has been successfully developed in several space applications. It is adaptable but not limited to small-scale space flight systems such as the CubeSats, the SmallSats and, now, a self-propelled helicopter.

To mention that there are many other NASA open source programs. There are more than 500 open source 3.0 licensed software programs. Long before the concepts of free software and open source were formed, NASA shared much of its code under COSMIC.

NASA has been using Linux on the International Space Station (ISS) for a long time. Linux's journey to supercomputer dominance began at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) with the first Beowulf supercomputer.

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Written by giorgos

George still wonders what he's doing here ...

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