Comment Runs Ubuntu (Score 4, Interesting) 27
What an amazing little machine. Having flown my share of RC aircraft, I'm amazed that it flew for so long before it finally crashed. This is the kind of NASA engineering that we have found so awesome over the years.
I listened to a fascinating interview with one of the project leads and he revealed that Ingenuity runs Ubuntu and they actually had the ability to get a actual remote shell through Perseverance. They used this shell on a couple of occasions to modify the script that used ffmpeg to create video files from the still images, among other tasks. Pretty interesting stuff.
Has to be the coolest use of Linux to date. And the fact that open source software such as ffmpeg is running on a computer on another planet.