Meet up with the open up-supply software program powering NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter

When NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter hovered earlier mentioned the Pink Earth April 19 on its maiden voyage, the minute was hailed as the 1st instance of driven, controlled flight on a further world. Figuring out how to fly on Mars, where by the air is slender but gravity is about a 3rd of that on Earth, took a long time of work. Along with the obstacle of producing a craft that was up to the activity, the mission needed program to make the unparalleled flights doable.

So they turned to F Prime, a reusable, multi-mission flight software program framework intended for CubeSats, little spacecraft, and instruments. The application was at first formulated in 2013 by a staff led by Tim Canham at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California with the goal of building a very low-price tag, transportable, pliable application architecture solution that would permit elements composed for a person application to be reused simply in other programs and run on a variety of processors.

In 2017, the workforce pushed for F Key to be introduced as open up-source, indicating anyone could freely access the software’s resource code, letting external collaborators, universities, and the general public to use the framework on their possess tasks. It is one particular of hundreds of codes NASA tends to make available to the public for totally free, equally as open-resource or by its computer software catalog.

“F Primary has enabled a ton of targets we have experienced at JPL to design a truly reusable multi-mission flight architecture with the additional bonus of the open-resource collaboration and visibility afforded by the Mars Helicopter undertaking,” Canham stated. “It is kind of an open up-resource victory, mainly because we’re traveling an open up-supply running method and an open up-resource flight computer software framework, and flying professional components that you can buy off the shelf, if you desired to do this oneself sometime.” (The helicopter carries a mixture of custom-made and off-the-shelf components—many from the world of mobile cellular phone technology—including its two cameras.)

Before Ingenuity, F Prime (also published as F’) had presently been place through its spacecraft paces, operating productively aboard the ISS RapidScat scatterometer instrument on the Worldwide Place Station since 2014 and JPL’s ASTERIA CubeSat in 2017. Wanting ahead, F Prime is scheduled to operate on jobs like NASA’s Lunar Flashlight CubeSat, which will glimpse for surface area ice in the Moon’s craters the agency’s Near-Earth Asteroid Scout CubeSat, which will map an asteroid and perhaps JPL’s Ocean Worlds Lifestyle Surveyor instrument, which would help look for for drinking water-based mostly everyday living in our photo voltaic process.

Aadil Rizvi, flight program lead for Lunar Flashlight and NEA Scout at JPL, suggests F Prime delivers an out-of-the-box resolution for several flight program expert services, this kind of as commanding, telemetry, parameters, and sequencing for the spacecraft. You will find also a form of “automobile-coding” instrument that would make F Prime very portable for use across missions.

“This tends to make it very easy to drop in a application part from something like Mars Helicopter into yet another mission’s flight computer software these types of as Lunar Flashlight or make the ingredient accessible for open up-supply use by anybody else making use of F Key,” Rizvi reported. “And it is pretty great that a sizeable part of application utilized on the Mars Helicopter is identical to program on a different spacecraft likely to the Moon, or an asteroid, or sitting down on a student’s desk.”

Universities See the Benefits of F Primary

Since its open-source debut, F Prime has gradually begun getting traction as a useful flight software alternative for university and student projects.

At Ga Tech, a workforce has integrated F Key in its GT1 CubeSat, aimed to provide as an schooling physical exercise that will have an interactive and computerized novice radio payload.

“We selected F Prime immediately after analyzing a handful of flight computer software frameworks, which include the selection of crafting our have from scratch,” mentioned Sterling Peet, Ga Tech exploration school member and software lead for GT1. “We never have the resources to develop all this code from scratch, use, and exam it to ensure the necessary concentrations of reliability in-dwelling. But by working with F Primary, we can leverage the legacy it has and also contribute our screening and connected rewards back to the F Key community and project.”

A Carnegie Mellon University student-led group chose F Primary to run its Iris Lunar Rover, a very small robot built to demonstrate the feasibility of nano-rovers in planetary exploration. “It was a practical selection with a immediate backlink to the creators, so we made a decision to use it ourselves,” mentioned Iris Deputy Method Manager Raewyn Duvall.

F Primary will command the rover although recording facts and checking its well being.

“The fact that it is open up-source gave us a vast variety of examples to base our have modules and enable us use the discussion board to get fast responses without having possessing to fear about potential assist service fees just to get solutions to inquiries we may perhaps have had,” Duvall explained.

JPL Small Scale Flight Software package Group Supervisor Jeff Levison sees college partnerships like the types with Ga Tech and Carnegie Mellon as a two-way road: JPL presents world-primary flight techniques know-how to budding engineers, and then down the line, all those upcoming engineers could finish up bringing their skills and a doing work knowledge of F Key to start out a vocation at JPL.

“F Key is not an straightforward architecture to decide up, so a university student who manages to learn it and develop a sound working challenge plainly has awesome possible for an corporation like JPL,” claimed Carnegie Mellon’s Duvall. “Many of our pupils performing on Iris that realized F Key have expressed interest in applying to JPL, which I think proves F Prime’s worth as a recruitment instrument.”