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RTEMS at http://www.rtems.org/ is used on some spacecraft instruments but I don't know about this specific spacecraft.

As for programming languages, Ada is still quite a popular choice in some areas; this is exactly the kind of thing it's designed for.

My speciality is embedded systems and I can attest to Linux being a dominate force for the past decade. Mainly due to a lot of work requirements being downgraded to soft real-time instead of the default hard real-time. QNX, VxWorks, and Phar Lap ETS still are preferred for projects with hard real-time requirements (Phar Lap ETS has fallen out of favor in our shop).

While Linux is growing in dominance it is not the only rising star. Projects like L4/fiasco looks promising and being deployed in projects (though not by us). I believe Qualcomm is incorporating L4 microkernel in their chipset.

My colleagues "just down the hall" have used RTEMS, and my colleagues farther "down the hall" are the ones maintaining it. If you are interested in an open sourced RTOS then please check it out.

As maintainer of RTEMS, I am very proud that both spacecraft are running our free real-time operating system on at least the Spacecraft Management Unit (SMU). These are both important missions which promise to provide us with new insights.

And it runs RTEMS. There are a lot of RTEMS physics applications thanks to the EPICS community. Great group of talented folks.

Since you said experimental physics... :)

The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) is a set of Open Source software tools, libraries and applications developed collaboratively and used worldwide to create distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments such as a particle accelerators, telescopes and other large scientific experiments.

EPICS is often used with the free real-time operating system RTEMS to build custom control systems.

Users of EPICS+RTEMS include Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Argonne National Labs, Brookhaven National Labs, and Canadian Light Source.

You are missing the many times RTEMS has left the Earth. Ignoring numerous satellites that are or were in Earth orbit, we have the Venus Express, Electra circling Mars, and the Dawn mission on its way to the asteroid belt. And later this year RTEMS is running on both the Herschel and Planck payloads.

I am sure RTEMS users can attest to more applications but those cover this end of the solar system.

GNU/Linux is not the only open source software that is out of this world. :-D

You are missing the many times RTEMS has left the Earth. Ignoring numerous satellites that are or were in Earth orbit, we have the Venus Express, Electra circling Mars, and the Dawn mission on its way to the asteroid belt. And later this year RTEMS is running on both the Herschel and Planck payloads.

I am sure RTEMS users can attest to more applications but those cover this end of the solar system.

GNU/Linux is not the only open source software that is out of this world. :-D

You are missing the many times RTEMS has left the Earth. Ignoring numerous satellites that are or were in Earth orbit, we have the Venus Express, Electra circling Mars, and the Dawn mission on its way to the asteroid belt. And later this year RTEMS is running on both the Herschel and Planck payloads.

I am sure RTEMS users can attest to more applications but those cover this end of the solar system.

GNU/Linux is not the only open source software that is out of this world. :-D

RTEMS is a free, open source alternative to VxWorks that provides POSIX threads in addition to an API we call the "Classic API" that was based upon an old dead proposed VITA standard from pSOS+ folks. RTEMS is single process, multi-threaded in the POSIX sense and has almost every POSIX 1003.1b features that is possible without being able to exec a new process. We use GNU tools and maintain an APT/Yum repository so GNU/Linux users have an easy situation with the tools. Check out some of the places it has been used at http://www.rtems.org/flyers.html and in the Wiki Applications page. You can get predictable tasking and algorithmic behavior while still staying in the free software world.

RTEMS is a free, open source alternative to VxWorks that provides POSIX threads in addition to an API we call the "Classic API" that was based upon an old dead proposed VITA standard from pSOS+ folks. RTEMS is single process, multi-threaded in the POSIX sense and has almost every POSIX 1003.1b features that is possible without being able to exec a new process. We use GNU tools and maintain an APT/Yum repository so GNU/Linux users have an easy situation with the tools. Check out some of the places it has been used at http://www.rtems.org/flyers.html and in the Wiki Applications page. You can get predictable tasking and algorithmic behavior while still staying in the free software world.

I was absolutely thrilled that RTEMS was accepted this year for the first time. As others have said, we also were not a mentoring organization in the past, so they must have evaluated the project and ideas page. We have already have some students pipe up on our mailing list and I really look forward to having some students accepted and working with them. I asked one question on the SOC google group and have lurked there. The google folks seemed to bend over backwards answering questions. Thanks.

Please remember: RT means NOT to be fast, but to guarantee certain worst-case-latencies under all circumstances, load and IRQ-storms.
If you look for an open-source RT-system, here you go:

1) my favourite, eCos from RedHat/ex-Cygnus.
It has a very, very sophisticated configuration tool (almost everything(!) you don't need is rippable from the kernel), has even a Linux-Compatibility-Module and so on

2) RTEMS is also free, configurable and so on. IIRC it was used to steer the cruise-missles. The configuration is a bit more complicated.

3) number three ... i forgot about it just this moment, sorry

If you want to pay, there is always:
QNX and VxWorks.