Yesterday, NASA landed a rover named Perseverance on Mars.
Mars 2020 is a Mars rover mission by NASA’s Mars Exploration Program that includes the rover Perseverance and the small robotic helicopter Ingenuity.
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.
“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 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.
