Phoenix Mars Lander - A Victory for Open Source

by Aaron Huslage - May. 25, 2008Comments (10)

Space agencies were some of the first places where you could find open source software "in the wild". Being natural early adopters, cash-strapped and very inquisitive, the agencies naturally took to the open source concept. Additionally they were some of the first users of ARPAnet and subsequently the Internet, which which lit a fire under the open source movement. Today this marriage between rocket science and open source saw its latest victory with the landing of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander.

The amount of software coordination and lack of commercial software geared to the aerospace industry continues to make custom software necessary for almost every mission. Linux, the gcc compiler, visualization libraries and more have allowed NASA to expand the capabilities of their missions beyond their greatest expectations. Congratulations to the team at JPL and the University of Arizona for their phenomenal accomplishment.


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10 Comments
 

One small step for NASA, One giant step for FOSS! Now how about we get back to focusing on how FOSS can end poverty and hunger, but seems like Microsoft is leading that charge after Linux was officially booted from the HDLC program...

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Any reason why is this a BIG win for the FOSS community?? The next time this will be useful will be when they go digging for rocks on Saturn and that's still 10-15 years away. Until then....

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@1crazy... - RTFA - this is a big movement for the aviation industry in general, and you can be well assured that Boeing, Airbus and the US Armed Forces are definitely looking at this stuff intently for use in their own applications...

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BFD...

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I was anxious to read the article based on the headline, but I fail to see any specifics in the correlation to the Phoenix mission. When asked about the computers seen in mission control, one of the mission control folks replied that their platforms; specifically the telemetry displays run on UNIX.

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Here's a much more interesting list of OS projects being used at NASA - http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/

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"but seems like Microsoft is leading that charge after Linux was officially booted from the HDLC program..."

You can do a lot with bribes these days ;)

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Given a choice, would you rather have FOSS on Mars or in the HDLC program :)

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Why is it that the chatter always digresses to Mircrosoft-hating. This is a post about FOSS on the Mars Mission. Lets acknowledge that and move on...

It might not be a BIG step for the FOSS movement, but its a cool accomplishment...

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The original name is "Free Software", not "Open Source".

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