One is attached to the International Space Station, and the other is collecting data as a stand-alone satellite. The latter would meet its permanent demise after burning up in the atmosphere if the mission were to be terminated.
A 2023 review by NASA concluded that the data they’d been providing had been “of exceptionally high quality.”
The observatories provide detailed carbon dioxide measurements across various locations, allowing scientists to get a detailed glimpse of how human activity is affecting greenhouse gas emissions.
(Ex NASA employee) David Crisp said it “makes no economic sense to terminate NASA missions that are returning incredibly valuable data,” pointing out it costs only $15 million per year to maintain both observatories, a tiny fraction of the agency’s $25.4 billion budget.
It’s usually a stripped down version of the Linux kernel. See my post above where some cube sats use the kernel as an x86 bootloader.
They probably just fork BusyBox for most stuff, then strip it even more if they need to. Honestly just doing development with podman/docker targeting your architecture is the most obvious solution. Especially since you can adjust your environment or target multiple different possibile architectures (assuming the board itself is built by a contractor) without too much headache.
One of the interesting things about the rapidly-improving RISC-V architecture is that NASA has decided to standardize on it for future in-space systems. Of course who knows when or if that’s going to happen now of course.
That’s actually really sick. Makes sense too since RISC-V can be super power efficient and it’s much easier to compile for. I’d guess that even as they get their budget cut, that part will remain operational. Too many private companies that will want to switch to RISC-V and will want to be able to just crib the tooling from a government agency.