This sequence of images – taken on May 22, 2021, by the navigation camera aboard NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter – depicts the last 29 seconds of the rotorcraft’s sixth flight. Frame rate is 3.3 frames per second until Ingenuity began its final descent to the surface, at which point it collected a frame every two seconds. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Created at NASA’s JPL, the open-source flight software called F Prime isn’t
just powering humanity’s first interplanetary helicopter; it’s also powering
inspiration at multiple universities.
When NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter hovered above the Red Planet April 19
on its maiden voyage, the moment was hailed as the first instance of powered,
controlled flight on another planet. Figuring out how to fly on Mars, where the
air is thin but gravity is about a third of that on Earth, took years of work.
Along with the challenge of developing a craft that was up to the task, the
mission needed software to make the unprecedented flights possible.
So they turned to F Prime, a reusable,
multi-mission flight software framework designed for CubeSats, small
spacecraft, and instruments. The program was initially developed in 2013 by a
team led by Tim Canham at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern
California with the aim of creating a low-cost, portable, pliable software
architecture option that would allow components written for one application to
be reused easily in other applications and run on a range of processors.
In 2017, the team pushed for F Prime to be released as open-source, meaning
anyone could freely access the software’s source code, allowing external
collaborators, universities, and the general public to use the framework on
their own projects. It is one of hundreds of codes NASA makes available to the
public for free, both as open-source or through its software catalog.
This illustration shows the Lunar Flashlight spacecraft, a six-unit CubeSat designed to search for ice on the Moon’s surface using special lasers. F Prime is scheduled to run on both this project and Near-Earth Asteroid Scout CubeSat. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“F Prime has enabled a lot of goals we’ve had at JPL to design a truly
reusable multi-mission flight architecture with the added bonus of the
open-source collaboration and visibility afforded by the Mars Helicopter
project,” Canham said. “It’s kind of an open-source victory, because we’re
flying an open-source operating system and an open-source flight software
framework, and flying commercial parts that you can buy off the shelf, if you
wanted to do this yourself someday.” (The helicopter carries a combination of
custom-made and off-the-shelf components – many from the world of cell phone technology
– including its two cameras.)
Before Ingenuity, F Prime (also written as F’) had already been put through
its spacecraft paces, operating successfully aboard the ISS RapidScat scatterometer
instrument on the International Space Station since 2014 and JPL’s ASTERIA CubeSat in 2017. Looking
forward, F Prime is scheduled to run on projects including NASA’s Lunar Flashlight CubeSat, which
will look for surface ice in the Moon’s craters; the agency’s Near-Earth Asteroid
Scout CubeSat, which will map an asteroid; and
potentially JPL’s Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor instrument, which would help
search for water-based life in our solar system.
Aadil Rizvi, flight software lead for Lunar Flashlight and NEA Scout at
JPL, says F Prime provides an out-of-the-box solution for several flight
software services, such as commanding, telemetry, parameters, and sequencing
for the spacecraft. There’s also a sort of “auto-coding” tool that makes F
Prime highly portable for use across missions.
“This makes it quite easy to drop in a software component from something
like Mars Helicopter into another mission’s flight software such as Lunar
Flashlight or make the component available for open-source use by anyone else
using F Prime,” Rizvi said. “And it’s pretty cool that a significant portion of
software used on the Mars Helicopter is identical to software on another
spacecraft going to the Moon, or an asteroid, or sitting on a student’s desk.”
Universities See the Benefits of F Prime
Since its open-source debut, F Prime has gradually begun gaining traction
as a useful flight software option for university and student projects.
At Georgia Tech, a team has incorporated F Prime in its GT1 CubeSat, aimed
to serve as an education exercise that will carry an interactive and automatic
amateur radio payload.
“We chose F Prime after evaluating a handful of flight software frameworks,
including the option of writing our own from scratch,” said Sterling Peet,
Georgia Tech research faculty member and software lead for GT1. “We don’t have
the resources to build all this code from scratch, use, and test it to ensure
the necessary levels of reliability in-house. But by using F Prime, we can
leverage the legacy it has and also contribute our testing and related benefits
back to the F Prime community and project.”
A Carnegie Mellon University student-led team chose F Prime to run its Iris
Lunar Rover, a tiny robot designed to prove the feasibility of nano-rovers in
planetary exploration. “It was a viable option with a direct link to the
creators, so we decided to use it ourselves,” said Iris Deputy Program Manager
Raewyn Duvall.
F Prime will control the rover while recording data and monitoring its
health.
“The fact that it is open-source gave us a wide range of examples to base
our own modules and let us use the forum to get quick answers without having to
worry about potential support service charges just to get answers to questions
we may have had,” Duvall said.
JPL Small Scale Flight Software Group Supervisor Jeff Levison sees
university partnerships like the ones with Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon as
a two-way street: JPL provides world-leading flight systems expertise to
budding engineers, and then down the line, those future engineers could end up
bringing their talents and a working understanding of F Prime to start a career
at JPL.
“F Prime is not an easy architecture to pick up, so a student who manages
to master it and create a solid working project clearly has amazing potential
for an organization like JPL,” said Carnegie Mellon’s Duvall. “Many of our
students working on Iris that learned F Prime have expressed interest in
applying to JPL, which I believe proves F Prime’s worth as a recruitment tool.”
Andrew Good / Ian O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
No comments:
Post a Comment