Is Unix/Linux used in space exploration? Post: 302538601

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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Is Unix/Linux used in space exploration? Post 302538601 by Perderabo on Wednesday 13th of July 2011 01:07:14 PM

07-13-2011

Administrator Emeritus

This is how I make my living these days. We are using Solaris but are migrating to Linux as fast as we can. We build launch vehicles and satellites. Sometimes we launch our own satellites. Sometimes we launch someone else's satellite in our launch vehicle. Sometimes our satellite rides up in someone else's launch vehicle.

For launch vehicles we use Solaris/Linux for Launch Support Equipment. LSE talks to the vehicle while it is on the ground. If a spacecraft goes up on our launch vehicles, we control the vehicle entirely with Solaris/Linux. If we built the spacecraft, we take over as soon as it is in orbit and perform the in-orbit testing. Often we drive until the craft is in the final orbit. Usually we turn the craft over to the customer. In a very few cases we drive forever. Our rooms like the mission control centers you see at NASA are 100% Linux/Unix. We talk to ground antennas via TCP/IP. We own one antenna and rent time on others. Our antenna is not Unix or Linux... don't know about the others. No Linux or Unix on board any of our spacecraft.

Most of what we do are GEO communication satellites. We do launch a few LEO science satellites for NASA and these could be called space exploration. We have one craft beyond Mars on its way to the asteroid belt. That certainly counts.

We use a mixture of Linux Solaris and Windows in the design of spacecraft. Our compute cluster for fluid dynamics computation is 100% Linux.

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

history

HISTORY(5)							File Formats Manual							HISTORY(5)

NAME

       history - record of current and recently expired Usenet articles

DESCRIPTION

       The file /var/lib/news/history keeps a record of all articles currently stored in the news system, as well as those that have been received
       but since expired.  In a typical production environment, this file will be many megabytes.

       The file consists of text lines.  Each line corresponds to one article.	The file is normally kept sorted in the order  in  which  articles
       are  received,  although  this  is not a requirement.  Innd(8) appends a new line each time it files an article, and expire(8) builds a new
       version of the file by removing old articles and purging old entries.

       Each line consists of two or three fields separated by a tab, shown below as 	:
	      <Message-ID>   	   date
	      <Message-ID>   	   date	 	   files

       The Message-ID field is the value of the article's Message-ID header, including the angle brackets.

       The date field consists of three sub-fields separated by a tilde.  All sub-fields are the text representation  of  the  number  of  seconds
       since  the  epoch -- i.e., a time_t; see gettimeofday(2).  The first sub-field is the article's arrival date.  If copies of the article are
       still present then the second sub-field is either the value of the article's Expires header, or a hyphen if no expiration date  was  speci-
       fied.   If  an article has been expired then the second sub-field will be a hyphen.  The third sub-field is the value of the article's Date
       header, recording when the article was posted.

       The files field is a set of entries separated by one or more spaces.  Each entry consists of the name of the newsgroup, a  slash,  and  the
       article number.	This field is empty if the article has been expired.

       For  example, an article cross-posted to comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.d that was posted on February 10, 1991 (and received three min-
       utes later), with an expiration date of May 5, 1991, could have a history line (broken into two lines for display) like the following:
	      <312@litchi.foo.com>  		666162000~673329600~666162180  	
		  comp.sources.unix/1104 comp.sources.d/7056

       In addition to the text file, there is a dbz(3z) database associated with the file that uses the Message-ID field as a key to determine the
       offset  in  the	text  file  where the associated line begins.  For historical reasons, the key includes the trailing  byte (which is not
       stored in the text file).

HISTORY

       Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews.  This is revision 1.12, dated 1996/09/06.

SEE ALSO

       dbz(3z), expire(8), innd(8), news-recovery(8).

																	HISTORY(5)