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Comment by fireball_blaze | Hacker News Reader

The flight software and embedded systems framework for the Ingenuity helicopter is called F' (pronounced F Prime) and is open source. Find it here:

https://github.com/nasa/fprime

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> pronounced F Prime

Some people really hate Amazon!

or they are paying respecs

or they are just taking the first derivative of ƒ. who knows, really!

or really dislike composite numbers

which is likely a common operation in flight control software ;-)

f' the father of f#

C++ and Python.

I always thought NASA used languages that were easier to verify (functional languages?). Good to see that the common boring languages are good enough!

People keep saying functional languages are easier to verify but most practical verification tools (model checkers and the like) are built on top of imperative languages.

Ingenuity is a tech demo, so they don't go all out to conserve limited development resource and uses mostly off the shelf hardware and software.

I have not looked at any of it, but would think they'd back it up with some form of math proof for at least some modules, and then applying those algorithms is just like any other C++ or Python code.

That's the framework, but is the actual flight software open source? I highly doubt it.

I don't see why it wouldn't be...

It's not like NASA is worried someone else is going to steal their software and send their own rover to mars using it...

More likely, they may be worried someone is going to find a vulnerability and take control of their multi-jillion-dollar piece of equipment.

At least in this case physical access is an extremely improbable attack vector...

That occurred to me as well, but I imagine this is separated from the communications.

Maybe it's not controlled at all... it does say autonomous, after all.

I imagine all commands have to get signed for the rover to accept them, but even if their keys were compromised and some vulnerability was found in the software, wouldn't you also need a network of really big dishes (see DSN) to actually send the commands to the rover?

> Wouldn’t you also need a big network of dishes

Nah, you can subscribe to big-dishes-on-demand using AWS Ground Station.

Wait, they did exactly that: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

While some innovate, once again AWS reaps the margins of the whole space conquest by discretely providing the infrastructure that everyone needs. Clever!

I honestly chuckled because of your AWS parody.

Than I clicked the link...

Same. Now I'm wondering what they're not offering.

Reminds me of this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48743043

If a third party can break into the satellite and communications firmware of two different spacefaring nations (you have to hijack an orbiter too) then there are bigger problems to worry about. The number of countries (counting the ESA as one big country) with objects in orbit around Mars can be counted on one hand.

On the other hand, I’m not sure satellites launched years ago have auto-upgrades enabled and up-to-date security policies (and certificates!), especially upgrade policies for the embedded chipsets. That must be an interesting problem to solve.

Well, I asked people who are world class competitive security competitors and had succes in HACK A SAT how's the satelites and stuff security and they said that it aint good

True. I'm not saying they should be worried about that at all, but it seems like something somebody might be worried about anyway.

Generally these things don't get open sourced. They really should be in the long run but these things take time.

Even Journals don't insist on code yet unfortunately.

They might have licensed closed source components from third party vendors that prevent them from open sourcing the whole thing.

Maybe, but I doubt it. I'm currently working on another NASA rover project (going to the Moon, not Mars) and we don't use any third party code. Our code is based off of another open source NASA project (Core Flight System), but we don't open-source our exact flight software. Mostly this is simply because we have to go through a lengthy vetting process to ensure we don't inappropriately release anything that falls under ITAR or EAR, and we just don't have the extra time or budget for it.

Typically at NASA it's the more open-ended research projects that have time and support for open sourcing their code. There's less benefit in releasing a specific rover's flight software than there is in releasing the general framework that said software is based on.

Excellent info, thank you!

A lot of speculation here, but the real reason is likely a mix of export control (ITAR) and proprietary components. Essentially, anything that could potentially be used in a missile is very tightly controlled technology and is difficult to release to the public.

Prime as in Optimus lineage? Rover! Transform and roll out!

Tangentially related, but Optimus Prime has a drone - Roller.

https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Roller_(G1)

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