Latest on Mars

  Just less than 4 days ago   Nasa has made history   once again, flying a helicopter on Mars for the first time in human history. And that has been possible thanks to many   brilliant researchers, scientists, and engineers ... but also   thanks to Open Source Software and GitHub . Intro Today's post is a special one, it is a celebration of an  incredible achievement  for the teams at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). Less than 4 days before the publishing of this post, in fact, we all watched in awe as the first Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, took flight in the thin Martian atmosphere. But this is not only an achievement for Nasa and JPL. It's  a big day for Open Source, and for GitHub . A Win for Open Source In fact,  nearly 12,000 developers on GitHub  contributed to Ingenuity’s software via open source. Moreover, Nasa's JPL itself has used GitHub for managing this project. As you can see above, someone in the control room is tracking the  progress on a GitHub Issue  m

  NASA   has just deployed   Ingenuity , a lightweight helicopter sent with the payload of the most recent Mars rover,   Perseverance . At exactly 3:34 AM (ET) Ingenuity successfully executed the first powered flight on another planet. That wasn't the only first in space history today, though. As it turns out, it was also the first time a linux process has ever been executed on another planet. Which got me wondering, what other operating systems have we as a species hurled into the cosmic abyss? Let's get into it. In the early days of spaceflight, when programs like Russia's  Sputnik  and the U.S's  Explorer  were being rolled out, each new craft came with its own custom built OS. These were often tailored to those craft's specific needs, and extremely basic by modern standards. Enter stage right: a man by the name of  J. Halcombe Laning . Laning was a pioneer of his time who worked with engineers at MIT to create the first ever real time computer in the early fifti