NASA's Mars helicopter ran on Linux

200 million kilometers from Earth, Linux was flying through the Martian sky

Commands like mkdir and touch come from the world of Linux. That same world was running over 200 million kilometers from Earth, on Mars. In 2021, NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity became the first aircraft ever to make a powered flight on another planet. The system flying it ran on Linux, the first Linux ever to operate on Mars. The same Linux that runs servers on Earth flew in the sky of another planet.

Communication with Mars takes anywhere from a few minutes to over 20 minutes one way. Nobody can fly it live, so each flight is packed into commands ahead of time and the helicopter flies itself. The farther from Earth, the more it matters that a carefully written command runs exactly as written.