As the title says😉 It happened yesterday. How cool is that😎
Cool but not surprising 
Reading the IEE Spectrum interview, it seems that, the drone helicopter (Ingenuity) carried by Perseverance rover is running Linux …
- I recall walking by the Wind River stand at the “Embedded World” exhibition in Nuremberg after the first autonomous (no base station) Mars rovers – Spirit and Opportunity – landed in 2004 –
[LIST] - The stand was empty, apart from, a large stand-up poster of a rover and the headline –
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[INDENT=2]“The only operating system for miles.” – meaning: VxWorks …
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[HR][/HR]Yes, a small step for Linux but, NASA is quite conservative – the Perseverance software (written in C) seems to be running on – VxWorks …
- The first Mars landing – Pathfinder – was using VxWorks on the base station – the Sojourner rover software was running on a cyclic executive – a real-time system approach which doesn’t use an operating system – the decision-making logic simply runs in sequence on the bare hardware …
More on the helicopter
https://youtu.be/GhsZUZmJvaM
Describes some of their ideas and development efforts to build a delicate vehicle that can fly in the extremely thin Martian atmosphere while also sturdy enough to withstand the high G forces of liftoff and landing.
Yes, a small step for Linux but, NASA is quite conservative – the Perseverance software in C language seems to be running on – VxWorks.