![]() Nearly 12,000 people contributed code, documentation, graphic design, and more to the open source software that made Ingenuity’s launch possible. Meanwhile, the Python ecosystem played a key role in everything from ground control to flight modeling to data processing.īehind its expansive software were thousands of open source developers around the world, unaware of the gravity of their contributions. Much of its software is written in C++ using JPL’s open source flight control framework F Prime(F´). The Ingenuity helicopter runs an embedded Linux distribution on its navigation computer. And behind its expansive software were thousands of open source developers around the world, unaware of the gravity of their contributions. Behind the 4-lb helicopter were contractors from recognizable companies like AeroVironment, Lockheed Martin, and Qualcomm. The team that built Ingenuity is much bigger than JPL’s 6,000 employees. ![]() “All the boundaries we have in our engineering disciplines, we couldn’t have them anymore,” Ingenuity Project Head MiMi Aung told the Making Space podcast. Packing everything Ingenuity needed into such a lightweight rotorcraft was an engineering feat that lived up to the project’s name. ![]() In order to fly in Mars’s thin atmosphere-with an atmospheric volume less than 1% of Earth’s-NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had to keep the weight of Ingenuity below four pounds (1.8kg), including blades, a motor, a power supply, solar panels, and enough computing power to monitor instruments and keep the helicopter from deviating from its pre-programmed course. That’s the altitude the small helicopter hovered just above the surface of Mars, marking a major milestone for humanity: the launch was the first powered flight on another planet and proof that it’s possible for a helicopter to achieve lift-off on Mars. However, Ingenuity’s most important journey was only about 10 feet. The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter departed Earth for its 293 million mile trip to Mars aboard the Perseverance Rover last July. Today, nearly 12,000 developers will see a new badge on their GitHub profile celebrating their contributions to the specific versions of projects and libraries used by NASA to fly the Ingenuity Helicopter on Mars.
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