NASA’s upcoming Artemis programme, which will use this SLS rocket, doesn’t have onboard Linux machines, but back on Earth Linux is critical to pre-launch simulations.
Credit: NASA
An initiative of the European Space Agency in collaboration with The Raspberry Pi Foundation, Astro Pi is providing teams of young coders with the opportunity to see their applications running aboard the International Space Station, Python and the Linux Operating system. The Astro Pi platform comprises a RPi 4, a sensor HAT and a HQ Camera.
You’ll probably have noticed that NASA is intent on returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. Called the Artemis programme, it’ll be based on the Orion spacecraft that will be launched atop the new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. But given NASA’s apparent reluctance to use Linux for mission-critical applications, it’ll probably come as no surprise that Linux doesn’t form a part of either Orion or SLS. That doesn’t mean that the success of Artemis won’t depend on Linux, though – far from it.
Space exploration might have evolved to use commercial service providers such as SpaceX, but further democratisation of space research is just a pipe dream, you might think. But you’d be wrong.