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To introduce myself, I worked on the Mars Polar Lander project as their Outreach Architect, and did some work with the Ground Data Systems crew.

That report is bull as far as I am concerned. We worked our ARSES off as launch came closer. I have never worked with a brighter, more intelligent, and more optimistic crew than the Mars Polar Lander team that was assembled at MVACS before that fateful landing.

After the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost, we had a huge influx of support from JPL; system admins, scientists, programmers, all drafted in at short notice simply to come in and fill in the budget shortage that we'd been suffering from before.

I somehow don't believe JPL would have thrown everything they had at us, to help us out, if they somehow knew this "secret" that the lander was doomed to fail.

It is possible that such a report could have kept secret by uppermost echelons of NASA, and kept from the team and the JPL management. I find that difficult to believe; I would count any such action as bordering criminal, after the incredible amount of hard work sunk by the staff of the mission before landing.

Really, the feeling of utter disbelief we had when it crashed said it all. Noone really expected it to happen, after all the effort, and it took a long time for some of the crew to come to terms with it.

Also, the Mars missions are underwent a fundamental and deep review of their future after this mission failed; it simply wasn't in NASA's interests to cover this up, since it really would have been a "worstcase" end to their Mars Surveyor 98 missions, with only ONE success (the global surveyor). If they did know about this, it would have made sense for them to come out and say it, and attempt a fix, rather than keep it secret, and throw (useless) resources at the team!

As with all other management, NASA executives can be dumb, but I don't believe they could be that dumb.

To introduce myself, I worked on the Mars Polar Lander project as their Outreach Architect, and did some work with the Ground Data Systems crew.

That report is bull as far as I am concerned. We worked our ARSES off as launch came closer. I have never worked with a brighter, more intelligent, and more optimistic crew than the Mars Polar Lander team that was assembled at MVACS before that fateful landing.

After the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost, we had a huge influx of support from JPL; system admins, scientists, programmers, all drafted in at short notice simply to come in and fill in the budget shortage that we'd been suffering from before.

I somehow don't believe JPL would have thrown everything they had at us, to help us out, if they somehow knew this "secret" that the lander was doomed to fail.

It is possible that such a report could have kept secret by uppermost echelons of NASA, and kept from the team and the JPL management. I find that difficult to believe; I would count any such action as bordering criminal, after the incredible amount of hard work sunk by the staff of the mission before landing.

Really, the feeling of utter disbelief we had when it crashed said it all. Noone really expected it to happen, after all the effort, and it took a long time for some of the crew to come to terms with it.

Also, the Mars missions are underwent a fundamental and deep review of their future after this mission failed; it simply wasn't in NASA's interests to cover this up, since it really would have been a "worstcase" end to their Mars Surveyor 98 missions, with only ONE success (the global surveyor). If they did know about this, it would have made sense for them to come out and say it, and attempt a fix, rather than keep it secret, and throw (useless) resources at the team!

As with all other management, NASA executives can be dumb, but I don't believe they could be that dumb.

For those of you interested in caching and how it can help large scale sites, I've helped co-author a technical report with Network Appliance, which was our experiences at accelerating the Mars Polar Lander website. That site used NetCache boxes, simple HTTP/1.1 cache-control headers, and a bit of cunningness to allow user-level tracking without letting the track requests filter through. As traditional, the site had a couple of problems which we've also included in the appendix after we fixed them, to hopefully save other people the same hassles in the future.

The technical report can be found at http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/307 1.html

We would all save a scary amount of bandwidth if more sites were designed with public caches such as (the awesome) squid in mind, and it's a really simple use of headers that make it possible.

For those who use Apache and are interested in making your own sites more cache-friendly, I recommend you look at mod_expires, which is part of the default distribution of Apache, although not compiled in by default. If you have large, static images that rarely change, then go ahead and put week-month-year long expiry headers on them, and watch the hits for those redundant images drop right down on your web server. And if you suddenly need to change them, then it's no real problem, as all you have to do is change the images URL and it will become a "new" entity for purposes of caching.

Yeah, granted, bandwidth is getting cheaper now, but for us poor Europeans, it's still a scarce commodity and we need to worry about these things :-)

-anil-

I used to work for the Mars Polar Lander project, on its Ground Data Systems. One thing about this announcement is that its only making official what already happens a lot in NASA.

Internally, we used a lot of Linux boxes, and even more GNU tools on Solaris boxes. In fact, the whole image processing pipeline was built using a series of BASH scripts by the NASA AMES team, as part of their operations deployment.

The web servers for the MPL were Solaris x86 boxes driven by Apache and PHP, while the support boxes for DNS and mail were Linux (red hat, stripped down). All ultra-reliable, getting them secure was the hardest bit of the whole operation really (we considered OpenBSD for a while, but didnt have enough inhouse skills with it)

And, to reassure you, no Windows servers were used for anything other than looking pretty.
Oh, and Quake III. None of the Linux boxes had 3D cards :)

Anil Madhavapeddy

Hi, I'm part of the MPL team, and thought you guys might like to know that we are taking the flight-spare MPL to a secret location in Death Valley, and running a complete simulation of operations as they might have been had it landed on Mars.

The point? To test the instruments and make sure they would have done what they are meant to, as a number will be reused in future missions (the Stereo Surface Imager in particular).

You can follow all the images and simulations if you're interested in what actual science was being conducted, at our official site www.marspolarlander.com

Cheers,
Anil Madhavapeddy - Ground Data Systems - Outreach
Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor

--
Anil Madhavapeddy, anil@mars.ucla.edu
Outreach Architect, Mars Polar Lander, UCLA

I went to the lander main site, and clicked the landing Site link, and I can't find any mention of 'bloody great canyon' anywhere..

EZ
-'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.marspolarlander.com/

The following error was encountered:

• Connection Failed

The system returned: (79) Connection refused

This means that: The remote site or server may be down. Please try again soon.

Generated by squid/1.1.9@cache.iaea.org
--
Paul Gillingwater