Helios

Helios (/ˈhiːli.ɒs/; Ancient Greek: Ἥλιος Hēlios; Latinized as Helius; Ἠέλιος in Homeric Greek) was the personification of the Sun in Greek mythology. He is the son of the Titan Hyperion and the Titaness Theia (Hesiod) (also known as Euryphaessa (Homeric Hymn 31)) and brother of the goddesses Selene, the moon, and Eos, the dawn.

Helios was described as a handsome titan crowned with the shining aureole of the Sun, who drove the chariot of the sun across the sky each day to earth-circling Oceanus and through the world-ocean returned to the East at night. In the Homeric hymn to Helios, Helios is said to drive a golden chariot drawn by steeds (HH 31.14–15); and Pindar speaks of Helios's "fire-darting steeds" (Olympian Ode 7.71). Still later, the horses were given fiery names: Pyrois, Aeos, Aethon, and Phlegon.

As time passed, Helios was increasingly identified with the god of light, Apollo. However, in spite of their syncretism, they were also often viewed as two distinct gods/titan (Helios was a Titan, whereas Apollo was an Olympian). The equivalent of Helios in Roman mythology was Sol, specifically Sol Invictus.

NASA Pathfinder

The NASA Pathfinder and NASA Pathfinder Plus were the first two aircraft developed as part of an evolutionary series of solar- and fuel-cell-system-powered unmanned aerial vehicles. AeroVironment, Inc. developed the vehicles under NASA's Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology (ERAST) program. They were built to develop the technologies that would allow long-term, high-altitude aircraft to serve as "atmospheric satellites", to perform atmospheric research tasks as well as serve as communications platforms. They were developed further into the NASA Centurion and NASA Helios aircraft.

Pathfinder

AeroVironment initiated its development of full-scale solar-powered aircraft with the Gossamer Penguin and Solar Challenger vehicles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the pioneering work of Robert Boucher, who built the first solar-powered flying models in 1974. Under ERAST, AeroVironment built four generations of long endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the first of which was the Pathfinder.

HeliOS

Helios was a Unix-like operating system for parallel computers developed and sold by Perihelion Software. It was most commonly used on various Transputer systems, but also supported other architectures. The system provided a micro-kernel that implemented a distributed name space and messaging protocol, through which services were accessed. A POSIX compatibility library enabled the use of Unix application software, and the system provided most of the usual Unix utilities.

Work on Helios began in the autumn of 1986. Its success was limited by the commercial failure of the Transputer, and efforts to move to other architectures met with limited success. Perihelion ceased trading in 1998.

Development

In the early 1980s, Tim King joined MetaComCo from the University of Bath, bringing with him some rights to an operating system called TRIPOS. MetaComCo secured a contract from Commodore to work on AmigaOS, with the AmigaDOS component being derived from TRIPOS. In 1986, King left MetaComCo to found Perihelion Software, and began development of a parallel operating system, initially targeted at the INMOS Transputer series of processors. Helios extended TRIPOS' use of a light-weight message passing architecture to networked parallel machines.