Sure one can whine about an RPi and "industrial reliability" (and all I can think of is that damned SD card...), but hey, it's just a cool movie, and it communicates in a nice way what they do. Also, it sounds like they should have been involved in the Mars helicopter (Ingenuity), which runs Linux and need these types of techniques. Cool podcast on the subject: [0]
While I agree with everything you said to a certain extent, I agree less that their expertise makes them uniquely qualified to engineer the flight software for the prototype helicopter on Mars. It is quite a different environment, but there is certainly plenty of crossover. I think JPL has enough expertise in this domain, though.
But yes, it's a wonderful thing that a fairly-accessible linux distribution is powering space missions in this era. It's long overdue, I think, and many of the JPL folks would probably agree.
> and all I can think of is that damned SD card...
I'm having some better experiences with SD cards marketed as "high endurance". Another trick I've been doing is to mount /var/log as tmpfs. If they crash when they run out of space, I let them restart themselves.
I've heard that you also should care about optimizing the quality of the power supply since power fluctuations or brownouts are apparently what actually kills SD cards. Personally, I just use USB drives because they can boot off of that now, and I treat the device as semi-disposable and assume that I'm going to reimage its thumb drive every few months.
To be honest I don't have that much issues (used to have much more with older SD card, pre-micro), but still, imagine a Raspberry Pi 4, 8 GB ram, and an nvme (m.2) hard drive. It would be soooo nice. I know there are compute module based products that do something like this, but imaging a 65 dollar pi with this slot.
