This is my third entry about Ingenuity, the helicopter on Mars, because I am fascinated by it. I would love to be on the team that designed, coded, and tested Ingenuity’s software.

 

NASA has described the mission to fly Ingenuity as Letter Perfect. The mission was to be a success if they had a single successful flight. Ingenuity has now had five flights, making it an overwhelming success.

 

I have learned more about Ingenuity’s hardware and software. The software is running on Linux, using a framework NASA developed called F Prime, a “flight software and embedded systems framework.” 

 

To fly the helicopter, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) uploads a sequence of commands to Ingenuity, which subsequently executes the commands autonomously, flying a specific route planned before each flight. If anything goes wrong, the software safely lands Ingenuity.

 

In addition to rugged and radiation resistant components, Ingenuity has some off-the-shelf parts, including a cell phone processor board called Snapdragon 801, manufactured by Qualcomm. Ingenuity also has a laser altimeter made by SparkFun, a maker of open-source hardware.

 

NASA has also open-sourced the software framework for Ingenuity, so you can use it on your own projects.

 

Here is an article about Ingenuity:

 

 

GitHub has F Prime here:

 

 

And here is a link to SparkFun: