Open Source Code Helped Ingenuity Fly on Mars
When NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter made its first flight in the thin Martian atmosphere this morning, it was more than a triumph for the mission teams at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). The achievement was also powered by an invisible network of open source developers. Nearly 12,000 developers on GitHub contributed to the software that flew on Ingenuity, many of them unaware that their code was heading to Mars.
To make that contribution visible, GitHub has worked with JPL to issue a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge. The badge appears on the GitHub profiles of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of open source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity. The full list of qualifying repositories — which includes SciPy, Linux, and NASA’s F Prime (F’) framework — is available in GitHub’s documentation.
The badge rollout also introduces a new Achievements section to the GitHub profile. Currently, Achievements includes the Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge, the Arctic Code Vault badge, and a badge for sponsoring open source work via GitHub Sponsors. GitHub says more achievements are planned, and the full story of how open source contributors helped Ingenuity take flight is detailed in The ReadME Project. While the developers remain on Earth, their code is now operating on another planet.
