Free/libre software, hardware, and ideals is building the next Space Age
Four new resources worth exploring every Friday
FOSS IN SPACE #3: Ingenuity
Here are this week's four free/libre space resources that are worth exploring:
1. First aircraft to fly on another world
NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter used a combination of custom-made and off-the-shelf hardware components - many taken from the world of smartphone technology such as the Linux-based Snapdragon - and flight control courtesy of F Prime. Its a FOSS flight software C++ framework initially created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), designed not just for Martian helicopters but to be portable across a wide range of missions and hardware architectures.
Link: F Prime
2. FOSS NASA
NASA science data officer Dr. Steve Crawford delivered a keynote presentation at FOSDEM 23 about the space agency's use of open source software and the open data generated by its missions. Recent triumphs such as the flight of Ingenuity and processing images returned from the James Webb Space Telescope are just a small sample of the contributions made between NASA and the open source community.
Link: NASA and Open Source Software
3. Seek and Ye Shall Find
Running the world's largest space program means a lot of software developers creating a lot of code! NASA uses multiple public repositories (such as GitHub) to host its FOSS-friendly software and welcome community participation. Code for things such as autonomous robots, wrangling enormous amounts of data, image processing, and simulating extraterrestrial environments. More than 500+ projects can be found in this searchable catalog.
Link: CODE.NASA.GOV
4. Hyperspectral
Wyvern is a Canadian space data company that uses its three Dragonette satellite constellation (a fourth satellite is to be deployed this year) to capture the highest resolution non-military hyperspectral imagery. It has created a new Open Data Program to provide unrestricted access and free use of (a portion of) this data under a Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0), requiring only an attribution credit.
Link: Wyvern Open Data
My local Linux User Group hosted a talk and demo this week by Marcel Gagné on open source AI. Very good. For example, giving DeepSeek a single sentence prompt about writing a game in Python and watching it create it from scratch, saving it, and running it. Particularly fascinating was putting the AI in "reasoning mode" and watching it work out a solution to a problem very much like how a person would work it out (not simply provide an answer).
It was a lot of ground to cover and I have many tabbed bookmarks. I'm going to explore using AI as a "personal tutor" as I learn Python.
One statement he made stands out to me: "The AI you are using today is the worst AI you will ever use." The AIs are growing in capabilities in leaps and bounds. Progress is literally jumping forward month by month.
Quote of the Week: "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."
— NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) senior engineer Tim Canham on Ingenuity
Until next week....Onward!
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