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Having that badge would give anyone very cool bragging rights about how they wrote software that's running on Mars. It makes perfect sense that NASA used a lot

Having that badge would give anyone very cool bragging rights about how they wrote software that's running on Mars. It makes perfect sense that NASA used a lot of open source software for this. If some high quality, widely used and tested code already exists, why not use it instead of trying to reinvent everything?

burundi_coffee 5y ago
> If some high quality, widely used and tested code already exists, why not use it instead of trying to reinvent everything? This is precisely the spirit of free software and the motivation behind movements like public money public code. Govermnets immensely overpay for software (projects).
dimator 5y ago
I highly doubt it's running on Mars. For one thing, sibling comment has a list of repos that have the badge, and it's a lot of python packages. I suspect it's more along the eath-based infrastructure and data processing side of the equation. Still a pretty cool get, though.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Apparently some of the non-mission critical experimental components that were sent to Mars run your standard Linux systems with some Python software, as well. I believe I heard in an interview with a NASA engineer that they were using Python for ML and scripting.
- stavros 5y ago
  Well, I just checked and I got the badge! Go me! I wonder which of the tens of open source libraries I've written was actually used by NASA! Oh, the badge tells, you... Hmm, let's see, it says "attrs". That's not mine, I must have submitted a PR at some point, let me find it. Ah, right. I changed "serious business aliases" to "serious-business aliases" in the README. You guys are all welcome.
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    Mine was some CMake fixes for cURL when using it as a subproject in a "superbuild" project.
    - stavros 5y ago
      Still better than adding a hyphen...
  - dima55 5y ago
    I literally worked on the heli, but my badge came from a documentation patch to numpy :)
robbedpeter 5y ago
I once spent a week troubleshooting a pair of routers that were part of a NASA Mars mission. They were using firmware over a decade old at the time, which was causing issues with the internet facing edge devices, which had automatically updated a few weeks prior, and that started causing massive packet loss. There were redundant paths with redundant hardware, and the node I worked on wasn't particularly important, but I got a taste of what the engineers and scientists at NASA must live for, the sense of contributing to something historic, profound, and deeply human. The fix was simple at the end, a firmware rollback and disabling further updates, and most of the time was consumed in conversation and carefully assessing each step and action, but I count it as a high point in my career. Just to touch the edge of it was special. The people whose code and engineering get sent to space are contributing to the betterment of mankind, literally making the universe a better place. Kudos to those guys. To write code that's part of a critical system is a meaningful in a way

burundi_coffee 5y ago

> If some high quality, widely used and tested code already exists, why not use it instead of trying to reinvent everything? This is precisely the spirit of free software and the motivation behind movements like public money public code. Govermnets immensely overpay for software (projects).

dimator 5y ago

I highly doubt it's running on Mars. For one thing, sibling comment has a list of repos that have the badge, and it's a lot of python packages. I suspect it's more along the eath-based infrastructure and data processing side of the equation. Still a pretty cool get, though.

heavyset_go 5y ago
Apparently some of the non-mission critical experimental components that were sent to Mars run your standard Linux systems with some Python software, as well. I believe I heard in an interview with a NASA engineer that they were using Python for ML and scripting.
stavros 5y ago
Well, I just checked and I got the badge! Go me! I wonder which of the tens of open source libraries I've written was actually used by NASA! Oh, the badge tells, you... Hmm, let's see, it says "attrs". That's not mine, I must have submitted a PR at some point, let me find it. Ah, right. I changed "serious business aliases" to "serious-business aliases" in the README. You guys are all welcome.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  Mine was some CMake fixes for cURL when using it as a subproject in a "superbuild" project.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Still better than adding a hyphen...
- dima55 5y ago
  I literally worked on the heli, but my badge came from a documentation patch to numpy :)

robbedpeter 5y ago

I once spent a week troubleshooting a pair of routers that were part of a NASA Mars mission. They were using firmware over a decade old at the time, which was causing issues with the internet facing edge devices, which had automatically updated a few weeks prior, and that started causing massive packet loss. There were redundant paths with redundant hardware, and the node I worked on wasn't particularly important, but I got a taste of what the engineers and scientists at NASA must live for, the sense of contributing to something historic, profound, and deeply human. The fix was simple at the end, a firmware rollback and disabling further updates, and most of the time was consumed in conversation and carefully assessing each step and action, but I count it as a high point in my career. Just to touch the edge of it was special. The people whose code and engineering get sent to space are contributing to the betterment of mankind, literally making the universe a better place. Kudos to those guys. To write code that's part of a critical system is a meaningful in a way