NASA uses F Prime, an open source framework, in Ingenuity Mars Helicopter
On 19th April 2020 NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter hovered above the Red Plane on its maiden voyage, that moment marked the first successful controlled flight to another planet. Flying to Mars, has been quite a challenging initiative that could years of hard work. And NASA declared it in Open Source so that globally like minds could work together and make impossible dreams come true.
The program was initially developed in 2013 by the team led by Tim Canham at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. But it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of countless invisible open source developers that helped contribute to making this project successful.
This project was created to be a cost-effective, portable and pliable software architecture option that would allow components were written for one application to be reused easily in other applications and It was also created to be easy-to-adapt so that it would run on a range of processors.
Creating the ideal machine for Mars came with its challenges. Finding the perfect way to overcome the changes in density, air and gravitational pull was far from easy. But implementing the program into Open Source became was the most effective way to overcome the presented challenges, and work with many minds across the globe. Open Source in its ability has been able to create a platform for like-minded individuals to work towards development, exchange of knowledge and help execute various projects with much efficiency.
What is F Prime?
F Prime (also written as F’) is a reusable, multi-mission flight open source software framework that enables the rapid development and deployment of embedded systems and spaceflight applications. Originally developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), F´ has been successfully deployed for several space applications. It has been used for but is not limited to CubeSats, SmallSats, instruments, and deployable.
Mars Rover F´ (F Prime) has the following features that enable robust embedded system design due to its implementation in open source:
Reusability – Its component-based architecture enables a high degree of modularity and software reusability.
Rapid Deployment- Provides a complete development ecosystem, including modeling tools, testing tools, and a ground data system.
Portability- It runs on a wide range of processors, from micro-controllers to multicore computers, and on several operating systems. Porting F´ to new operating systems is straightforward.
High Performance- It utilizes a point-to-point architecture. The architecture minimizes the use of computational resources and is well suited for smaller processors.
Adaptability- It is tailored to the level of complexity required for small missions. This makes F´ accessible and easy to use while still supporting a wide variety of missions.
Analyzability- The typed port connections provide strong compile-time guarantees of correctness.
C++ framework- providing core capabilities like queues, threads, and operating-system abstraction
Why Open Source
Benefits for global inclusion
- Almost NIL ownership cost
- Futuristic practice
- Knowledge sharing made easy
Lyra, as open source consultants, has been attesting to the benefits and ease of open source software (OSS). We have helped various businesses reach accelerated growth over the past, but watching Open Source be implemented in such an impactful way to create the first successful Martian project has left most of us speechless and excited about the abilities Open Source has to potentially change our future for the better.
This proves our belief, that Open Source is here to stay and it is time that we adapted with its endless capabilities to execute efficient work.
Open Source has been revolutionizing the creative aspect of our life, we are surrounded by its futuristic approach to innovation and we are merely watching as it enhances our evolution in unprecedented ways.
Universities see benefits in F Prime
F Prime, since its open-source debut, has definitely gained popularity as an efficient flight software option for university and student projects.
At Georgia Tech, a team has incorporated F Prime in its GT1 CubeSat, aimed to serve as an education exercise that will carry an interactive and automatic amateur radio payload.
A research faculty member at Georgia Tech and software lead for GT1 says, “We chose F Prime after evaluating a handful of flight software frameworks, including the option of writing our own from scratch” and also stress further saying “We don’t have the resources to build all this code from scratch, use, and test it to ensure the necessary levels of reliability in-house. But by using F Prime, we can leverage the legacy it has and also contribute our testing and related benefits back to the F Prime community and project.”
“The fact that it is open-source gave us a wide range of examples to base our own modules and let us use the forum to get quick answers without having to worry about potential support service charges just to get answers to questions we may have had,” said Iris Deputy Program Manager Raewyn Duvall.
“F Prime is not an easy architecture to pick up, so a student who manages to master it and create a solid working project clearly has amazing potential for an organization like JPL,” said Carnegie Mellon’s Duvall. “Many of our students working on Iris that learned F Prime have expressed interest in applying to JPL, which I believe proves F Prime’s worth as a recruitment tool.”
F Prime, an open source framework prove to be a recruitment tool.
Open Source – Benefits
Most of us are well aware of the benefits of Open Source and the current situation if anything just proves that it is impartial to any kind of work, business, community or people. Open Source can be used by anyone, literally and has a lot of convenience and profitability in daily work:
1. Shift focus from low quality work to high quality
Open source has been known to solve most problems for its users.
Management, overlooking of tasks, managing projects, skills or individual responsibilities have been made easier from the content repository, management, overlooking of tasks. While developers could mainly focus on troubleshooting, bug fixing and solving problems on raised tickets.
This allows the developers to systematically manage all these processes, meet un-faced challenges, work on new codes, find newer technologies to invent.
Since the open-source is a wide space with pre-existing codes, a lot of basic data is already available for use, this makes more space for new opportunities, for people to work towards new ideas and creations.
2. Code ownership cost is less to almost negligible on open source
Since the open-source enforces that procreators of code upload them with no licensing fee, modifiers can almost use the code for a less cost compared to other propriety alternatives that are involved in licensing a software code.
This reduces the overall cost of adopting open source for its codes and incorporating pre-existing features allows the developers to work towards creating results to the foundation of pre-existing codes.
If one goes through a proprietorship license, the cost of training, maintaining, developing, managing skills, time duration for task completion and supporting get very expensive for the owner. Having to pay for so many functionalities can be very hard on the economical part and can be easily avoided by using the free intellectual property available in the open-source community while working around licensing and legal formalities.
3. Open source is a futuristic practice of keeping up with innovations as well as their innovators
It is almost impossible to not come across startups, organizations, businesses or industry leaders shying away from saying that they use open source. Yes, they all agree that it has been able to create a fad among generation leaders because it impacts the way we now work when compared to the older times when it was so hard to come across new ideas or innovations.
Open source has offered a modern approach to coding, building software programs and working on technology-related ideas. It is exceedingly focusing on collaborative work rather than individual work. Even renounced companies like Microsoft, Apple and Swift have moved from their traditional practices and have started using open-source for their daily work as well. Today the largest corporations like IBM, SAP and Adobe are a part of the open-source community because it is our generations way of working together towards many progressive goals.
4. Contributing, sharing knowledge, pooling resources and working together is the way to make advanced and upstream upgrades to one’s existing work
Open source is a well-knit community, where it is highly encouraged to take active participation for both building better technology as well as sharing it. Just like the relationship between well reasoning neighbors makes a good community, the same goes for reasonable users of the open-source space.
It is almost impossible for any person to be able to perfect all the codes they write or even get satisfactory results from their labor. Rather than creating closed source codes, most developers leave it out into the community to get better desirable results from the same code. It allows you to see how people have better equipped your code, fixed errors and advanced it to reach better and efficient results than you had foreseen.
Without it, many of the technologies we take for granted today would never have developed or would be locked away behind patent law. This has been a successful reason behind revolutionizing the idea of ‘technology for innovation’ and has been the core reason behind our rapid development and shift in the global economy. Especially during a Global pandemic such as the Covid-19, we’re witnessing what was assumed to be an unthinkable solution that has currently changed the statistics of India.
Open Source – Future
Why most businesses are opting for Open Source?
There are many reasons why most people are turning to open source, it’s not just due to its cost-effective implementation, the wide knowledge space it provides or even the efficiency of using these source codes in software development.
It’s because it has been created to encourage participation, exchange of knowledge, and allows countless users to brainstorm and come up with the most advanced solutions to pre-existing codes. This is why we believe Open source is for anyone; whether you’re a software developer, business owner, entrepreneur or just a curious mind.
Lyra attests to the growth potential of Open Source
Open Source – Support
Some of the biggest challenges that organizations face today with supporting their open source software are:
- Open Source Security and Open Source Compliance risks
- Difficulty in finding support for Open Source Software other than OS community
- Interoperability problems Integration, support issues with existing projects and open source technologies
- Performance and system management
- Network Planning
- Configuration Management
- Fault Management
- Security Management
- Performance Management
Partner now with Lyra for productive and effective open source support →
Manage Open Source Components
While working in open source, it is very important to understand the technicalities involved in working within the open source. Yes, there are free source- codes available, but not all codes are free to use.
Thus, having a supportive partner can help you mitigating security risks through comprehensive OSS logistics solutions by:
- Automatically identifying open source security vulnerabilities
- Assess and remediate known vulnerabilities
- Continuously monitor your codebase for future security vulnerabilities
- Discover and track what specific open source components are in use within their applications
- Identify security vulnerabilities reported against specific open-source software components
- Assess which specific applications use components with known vulnerabilities
No matter who you are, or what you do; open source is a platform designed to co-create with like-minded people. It has been changing the way we did business back in the day and in a way it has taught us that innovations require great minds to work together. So what’s stopping you from using Open-Source and leveraging its efficiency to your advantage?
Get in touch with us at info@lyrainfo.com for a free consultation session from our experts.
References:
1. NASA’s News – Open Source Software (OSS) Powering Ingenuity Mars Helicopter
4. Open Source Flight Software, F Prime, used in NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter
5. F Prime – Open Source Framework (PDF)