Linux lands on the Red Planet
The Perseverance rover’s successful Mars landing took Linux and open source software to another planet.
Linux is no longer just the most widelyused operating system on Earth – it’s now made its way to Mars. NASA recently landed the Perseverance rover on our celestial neighbour, along with a small helicopter, known as Ingenuity. This was used to attempt the first powered flight on a planet other than Earth, and it was powered by Linux.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) senior engineer Tim Canham said, in an interview with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (see http://bit.ly/lxf275ieee), 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.” The framework Canham referred to is
F Prime (http://bit.ly/lxf275fprime), which is an “open-source framework for small-scale flight software systems.” As he explains, because it’s open-source, you can use F Prime that’s made its way to Mars and use it with your own project.
“It’s kind of an open-source victory,” Canham says, “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.“ It’s a hugely exciting development not just for mankind, but for Linux and open source. It shows how open source software can help us explore new worlds, while making it possible for anyone to use the exact same software in their own projects at home – for free. As Twitter user @mikko so dryly observed, Mars is now “the second planet that has more computers running Linux than Windows.”
Keep up to date with the Perseverance’s Mars mission at http://bit.ly/lxf275mars.