‘Mangalyaan’ – Red Hat powered Red Planet Mission
One of the most celebrated Indian Space Mission “The Mars orbiter Mission powered with Redhat Linux” – “650 Million Km from Earth surface to our nearest planetary neighbour Mars has become scalable to Indian Scientist in the very first endeavor as Indias Mars orbiter space craft powered with Red Hat Linux has entered the orbit around the planet mars”.
Despite of many concern regarding the accuracy and scalability Indian space research organization on September 24, 2014 has received the laurels of mission success from the whole world as the space craft was accurately inserted into the mars orbit there by becoming the first nation in the world to reach Mars orbit on its first attempt itself
The most exhilarating fact revealed about the mission is that Red Hat Linux has given a competitive advantage to ISRO in terms of cost cutting and maintaining a secured connectivity with the vehicle at every stage of the mission. In terms of expense India spend only $71 million on the mission, it is surprising that this budget is lesser than the expense of the un-scientific Hollywood block buster Gravity ($105 million) & $671 million cost of Maven. The most wonderful tariff for the journey of the mars mission was worked out as “A one-km auto rickshaw ride in Trivandrum costs Rs 10 and India reached Mars at Rs 7 per km”.
According to ISRO, MOM is in good health. The spacecraft activated all of its five instruments in the days following orbital insertion and now actively preparing the study on comet encounter. The Redhat powered Mars console is receiving images and information’s from the space craft with utmost perfection and accuracy.
Not surprisingly Red Hat Linux enjoys the full credentials of a Secure, Reliable, Robust, Low Cost, Easy to Deploy operating system, that it spans its functionalities right from our day to day life to the heights of the higher end application in our planetary neighborhood.
Manager of the Space Operations Computing (SpOC) for NASA Keith Chuvala is on the record saying, “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable — one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust, or adapt, we could.” Running on Linux, the robot can be manipulated by onboard astronauts with ground controllers commanding it into position and performing operations
As the Red Hat pings from the terrestrial servers of ISRO to our space craft around the Red Planet and manages the operations, it would be rather fishy for a techie to live in this earth as an alien to the open source world ignorant about the immense possibilities of open source technologies.
