GitHub Gives Developer Badges For Contributing To NASA Helicopter Software

GitHub will award all developers who directly or indirectly contributed to the software for NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity a badge to recognize their contribution. Nearly 12,000 developers on GitHub contributed open source software used for the helicopter.

On the day Ingenuity first flies, GitHub will give all involved developers a special badge for their GitHub profile. With this, the platform rewards the nearly 12,000 contributors who contributed to the open source software used for Ingenuity, especially since many of those developers may not even know that they enabled the first helicopter flight on Mars, according to GitHub.

Developers who have contributed to a number of specific open source projects and libraries will receive the badge, including NASA’s SciPy, Linux and F Prime. Those projects were used by the Mars helicopter’s Jet Propulsion Lab team. But also developers of version 3.9.2 of Python, and smaller projects who contributed are recognized. GitHub has put the entire list online.

With the badge, GitHub will also add a new achievements section to profiles. It now includes the Mars 2020 Helicopter Contributor badge, the Arctic Code Vault badge, and a badge for sponsoring open source work through GitHub Sponsors.