In this year's DAta Systems In Aerospace conference which ended yesterday,
one of the very first presentations was entitled "Software Development for
a Deep Drilling Micro Rover for Mars Exploration". Therein the speaker
described development using Ada 95 targetting Linux. In the questions and
answers session, he was asked why they were so conservative in choosing
Ada as the language but so adventurous in choosing Linux as the operating
system.

Whatever about Linux, Ada was chosen because it is safe and reliable.