The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) has revealed that it played a part in the recent flight of a helicopter on Mars.
One of ANSTO’s instrument scientist s, Andrew Nelson, helped develop the open-source software used in the NASA/JBL Ingenuity flight.
“The SciPy software, which was developed by thousands of contributors, played a key role in everything from ground control to flight modelling to data processing, according to a report on GitHub,” ANSTO said.
“[Dr] Nelson is a co-author on a landmark paper on SciPy that was published in Nature Methods, which explored the fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python,” it said.
In a statement, NASA said its Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet.
NASA said the helicopter climbed to its prescribed maximum altitude of 10 feet (three metres) and maintained a stable hover for 30 seconds.
“It then descended, touching back down on the surface of Mars after logging a total of 39.1 seconds of flight,” NASA said.
It said Ingenuity’s initial flight demonstration was autonomous, piloted by onboard guidance, navigation, and control systems which ran algorithms developed by the team at JPL.
