MarCO: Interplanetary Mission Development on a CubeSat Scale [pdf]

I didn't want to editorialize the title, but the buried lede for the HN audience is that its camera subsystems run Linux and Python:

> MarCO’s camera systems, two per spacecraft, run a customized embedded Linux distribution on a GumStix single-board computer. A Python script spawns at boot time on each system, and effectively serves as the interface to the spacecraft. The script receives commands from and sends data to the FCPU via the RTC microcontroller, which acts as an I2C-UART bridge. A simple communications packet protocol defines the way the camera and FCPU interact, and includes basic data integrity checking through the use of CRC16-CCITT. The camera systems are powered on for short periods of time directly by FCPU GPIO lines to perform brief imaging campaigns, process the images, and store them on standard SD cards. Images can be retrieved any time the systems are powered.

As far as I can tell, this is the first time Python or Linux have been used beyond earth orbit.

These spacecraft flew past Mars yesterday and took this picture [1], in addition to successfully relaying the InSight landing telemetry.

[1]: https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1067189007455539202