Saturday, 16th December at 7 a.m. EST, Linux was sent into space, as part of a second-phase Air Force Research Laboratory program. The aim of this operation for the TacSat-2 (tactical satellite) program was to create "micro satellites" that can be launched quickly and cheaply, to support tactical military operations. "Say the Marines are going to land on a beach, and you want a satellite's view of the situation, but you don't have access to one of the big national asset satellites. That kind of access is very difficult to get for tactical purposes. You want to quickly create a satellite and get it up in space, and over the space you're interested in. We're proving you can do that, leveraging COTS solutions, easy solutions, and free software." - says Todd Brackett, president of the PTR Group.

The TacSat-2 tactical satellite was successfully launched at the Wallops Flight Facility, on Wallops Island, in Va. The TIE (Target Indicator Experiment) payload, an RF (radio frequency) sensor suite that is capable of gathering a variety of signals (including the maritime AIS (automatic identification system) signals currently required on large ships for port safety and homeland defense purposes), is Linux powered. "In essence, this is the successor to the Copperfield system presented in the Linux Journal for Tacsat-1, the main differences being we now have two CPU cards instead of one, support for AIS, and the SEI capability has been merged into a single cPCI card." - stated the PTR Group Engineer, Jeff Angielski.

The PowerPC CPUs are powered by a modified version of the DENX ELDK 3.1 Linux with kernel 2.4.25 and as bootloader, they've used U-Boot 1.1.2.

You can download the latest version of DENX ELDK Linux now from Softpedia.