Eventually, I managed to get a very small commit merged into the main branch of SciPy (which you can see [here](https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/12962)). Despite being, at most, a few lines of code, this was a huge landmark for me as a programmer. To my surprise though, in early 2021, a little badge pop up on my GitHub profile that said “Mars 2020 Helicopter Contributor”. I was confused. I didn’t recall working on helicopters, much less helicopters that flew on Mars. I still remember getting chills when I read that I contributed to a library that was used on NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, which involved the robotic helicopter Ingenuity. GitHub posted an [article](https://github.blog/2021-04-19-open-source-goes-to-mars/) explaining how about 12,000 people received a badge indicating that they had contributed to an open-source library that was used on the mission! Keep in mind that I made an absolutely tiny contribution, but I was extremely proud to be recognized in that way.
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