Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

Well not really, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that a lot of rocket science is increasingly using open source software (OSS). I'm currently reading Roving Mars by Steve Squyres which describes in detail NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers from the Mars Exploratory Rover mission. Its a fascinating book that takes you through the whole lifecycle, if you will, of a space rover project (there is an IMAX documentary as well with the same title). Anyways, I got curious as to what software is driving the rovers and did some digging around the NASA sites. It turns out that while the actual embedded on-board software is still custom designed (due to the highly real-time and mission-critical nature of the problem domain), the ground control software (called Science Activity Planner) uses several open source components that we're all familiar with at AOL: MySQL, Java [Expression Parser], Apache, etc. You can download and play with the planner software here.

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