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Open Source Satellite Control
Debra writes "Have you ever wondered how you harness a satellite control system written in three languages, on four development platforms, and deployed to multiple client environments? With open source, naturally. When one wrong move can cost millions, you must rely on teamwork, smart design, and open standards to keep the project -- if not the satellite -- from going down in flames. This article covers software engineering basics, taking advantage of outside solutions, and scripting multi-million-dollar manuvers."
Waffle Iron is trolling. The imerialmetric problem that NASA had with it's subcontractors wasn't an oh, they meant meters, not yards. Oops...
The problem was that the measurements drifted average hundres of conversations between two systems. The Free (as in love) GNU metric2imperial application introduces exactly those types of errors.
The best solution is just to just pick a system so that these conversion errors aren't introduced!
Both are in use in different parts of at least one satellite control system I am all too familiar with. Python is doing some telemetry crunching while perl is used extensively for ground control command scripting.