Slashdot Mirror

don't like it? do us all a favor and set up your own. the cost for entry is an internet connection and whatever bandwidth you can spare? That too much for you? Talk to an outfit like Telascience with big pipes who will host it for you free of charge. http://www.telascience.org/

but don't sit on your sofa and complain that no one is bringing you a free pizza when there's a FreePizzaIngredients place right next door, FreeOvens4U across the street, and good recipes all over the 'net.

"I've always been amazed at the Apollo spacecraft guidance system, built by the MIT Instrumentation Lab. In 1969, this software got Apollo 11 to the moon, detached the lunar module, landed it on the moon's surface, and brought three astronauts home. It had to function on the tiny amount of memory available in the onboard Raytheon computer--it carried 8 Kbytes, not enough for a printer driver these days. And there wouldn't be time to reboot in case of system failure when the craft made re-entry. It's just as well Windows wasn't available for the job." [Thank God!! - Ed.]

If NASA open-sources software of this calibre, the entire world will benefit. Look at what NASA's innovations have done for miniaturising circuitry, freeze-drying foods, high-speed airfoils and robotics (to name a few). Now, go download NASA mars rover imaging software (MAESTRO) at http://mars.telascience.org/softwaredownload and look around Mars yourself. With software of this quality open-sourced, just think of the value to the world.

It is a shame that Maestro appears to have stopped updating their data.

Still, it is excellent software, and fun to use even if you don't get where Spirit is today. With Maestro you can see what the rovers see, and what the rover operators and instruments see... Actual software used in mission control.

You could start looking at the Maestro site.

You can check a few other high (and relatively high) profile sites that run on Zope:

• NASA's Maestro
• AARP
• Boston.com
• Saugus.net
• Many others that don't immediately come to mind...

Zope is also part of Massachusetts' "Open Source Trough" and will quite likely eventually power the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts' site at www.state.ma.us.

There are a LOT of good legal uses for it. Moreso (in my mind) than KaZaA.

Yes indeed, not only to distribute Linux ISO's which is a common example, but BT usage is popping up all over the place, so I really hope they won't block the protocol at ISP level or try to make the software itself illegal. But then there's those loons that try to illegalize the whole thing, so you never know. :-P

In other words, something like this....

You can get that now for free. I've been using NASA's Maestro program since Spirit landed. You get EVERY raw feed from the probes (pics before processing, out of focus, ones with the wheels in the way, etc). It's very cool. Try it out.

We have a room on the irc.freenode.net servers called #cassini which is available to all who are interested in the Cassini project. Here you will find a wide range of interests discussed, from the informal to the most scientific details of the mission. Some of the Cassini staff have shown interest in participating to further support the project's public interest so don't be surprized to meet them there.

We also support the ' Maestro ' program which is the Public-Outreach software created for the Mars Exploration Rover Project from JPL . As a result, we helped maintain the #maestro room (also on freenode.net) which is still in operation today.

With such high interest building as Cassini-Huygens approaches orbital insertion and the Phoebe flyby, we expect a bigger rush in the next weeks. Join in and share the experience!

If you are not sure how to do 'IRC' there are many good primers online to help and you can visit http://freenode.net for details about connecting as well as links to assist you to set things up to chat online.

See all "/.'ers" there... ;^)

Pandelirium
http://www.pandelirium.net irc.freenode.net
#cassini
#maestro
#pandelirium

We have a room on the irc.freenode.net servers called #cassini which is available to all who are interested in the Cassini project. Here you will find a wide range of interests discussed, from the informal to the most scientific details of the mission. Some of the Cassini staff have shown interest in participating to further support the project's public interest so don't be surprized to meet them there.

We also support the ' Maestro ' program which is the Public-Outreach software created for the Mars Exploration Rover Project from JPL . As a result, we helped maintain the #maestro room (also on freenode.net) which is still in operation today.

With such high interest building as Cassini-Huygens approaches orbital insertion and the Phoebe flyby, we expect a bigger rush in the next weeks. Join in and share the experience!

If you are not sure how to do 'IRC' there are many good primers online to help and you can visit http://freenode.net for details about connecting as well as links to assist you to set things up to chat online.

See all "/.'ers" there... ;^)

Pandelirium
http://www.pandelirium.net irc.freenode.net
#cassini
#maestro
#pandelirium

All the scientists here at JPL are very happy to see that we'll be getting more science, however one of the issues is that we're going to be moving to a less efficient planning cycle, planning for two days per rover at a time. Also it will all be being done on earth time, which is nice for scientists, however it means things have to be planned very far in advance.

Also one of the problems we are experiencing is that a lot of the mission software was originally designed to only run at JPL on our computing environment, and is very difficult to take back to home institutions because it is so specialized.

I'm currently working on making the Science Activity Planner (the tool used by all scientists to do high level planning before they start sequencing) work collaboratively over the web. It's exciting because we're dramatically increasing the amount of people who can participate in high level planning. You can grab the public version, called Maestro, here.

One of the other challenges is the bandwidth and latency associated with transfering autogenerated data products (imagery etc) to all of our satalite institutions. I'm currently working on ways to reduce the necessary bandwidth but without lossy compression there's only so much one can do.

Anyways, this part of the mission will test out a paradigm known as "Distributed Mission Operations". You can download a paper written by my supervisor about how this was used on Pathfinder here.

Future mars missions will last far too long to bring scientists away from their home institutions and pay for temporary housing etc (which is a significant cost). Scientists want to be with their collegues and families during the long periods of exploration.

Hopefully this will prove that it is both feasible and desireable. There are several studies going on about this, but I'm not aware of any relevant links.

Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers

My whole kid's class is using Maestro to view the Mars photos in a similiar fashion to the NASA engineers.

Great science... and great learning as well. It's java driven... and crunches older computers. However, it really shows the excellent work that we are doing there.

AC

Java -I don't use Java for much but just did a run through with Maestro and it seems to manage under pressure, chews up a few 100Meg virtual memory as always but I'm still able to work with the 3D stuff at 20-100fps. That's with IBM Java 1.2 (build wndev20030516.

Java in Firefox. Just to get something more typical I installed Sun's runtime (J2RE 1.4.2_03). No issues with a bunch of web embedded stuff I checked.

Python. Installs and runs some of it's own samples with no issues.

Perl. You didn't ask but I use Perl a lot. No issues with V5.8.3.

All of the above are for XP SP2 V2055 on an IBM T41p (Pentium M) not an AMD64 system where NX flagging is\can be enabled. Microsoft's page on NX (mostly an app issue for SP2) and PAE (mostly a driver issue for SP2) is very informative.

Interestingly, NASA uses Open Source Plone to run some of their sites, including the Mars rover site.

You can learn more about how the rover works by downloading NASAs Maestro Program. It's a RAM hungry Javaapp that is nicely documented and let's you plan your own mission using their stripped down version of the Uplink-Browser. Give it a shot, it's pretty interesting (well, at least if you got some spare time on your hands to fiddle with it and are into Marsroving at all!).

cu,
Lispy

Ok - the ground control software for the NASA Mars Rovers. Or how about Satellite tracking visualization software. There's ShowSky , and I'd venture a guess that there's a whole host of other places it's being used in in-house and scientific apps that don't get the same press as the next release of the Sims.

If you're a fan of the NASA mars project: The main navigation app for the rovers is a pure Java application. (download Maestro here)

Don't forget Maestro.

If you're refering to Maestro, that is not the code I was refering to. If you look on this page, you will see this picture, which shows some pretty darn good 3d processing for only using a few still cameras! And if you look here, you will find this picture which shows a representation of what the Spirit rover's software uses to find its own way, without need of constant instruction from Earth. Pretty good software, if you ask me! The public Maestro program is pretty slow, but so is Java in general for high-performance applications. Maestro doesn't actually generate the 3d range information from the raw images, it just displays it (and apparently is used to figure out the rover's schedule of stuff to do).

If you're refering to Maestro, that is not the code I was refering to. If you look on this page, you will see this picture, which shows some pretty darn good 3d processing for only using a few still cameras! And if you look here, you will find this picture which shows a representation of what the Spirit rover's software uses to find its own way, without need of constant instruction from Earth. Pretty good software, if you ask me! The public Maestro program is pretty slow, but so is Java in general for high-performance applications. Maestro doesn't actually generate the 3d range information from the raw images, it just displays it (and apparently is used to figure out the rover's schedule of stuff to do).

If you're refering to Maestro, that is not the code I was refering to. If you look on this page, you will see this picture, which shows some pretty darn good 3d processing for only using a few still cameras! And if you look here, you will find this picture which shows a representation of what the Spirit rover's software uses to find its own way, without need of constant instruction from Earth. Pretty good software, if you ask me! The public Maestro program is pretty slow, but so is Java in general for high-performance applications. Maestro doesn't actually generate the 3d range information from the raw images, it just displays it (and apparently is used to figure out the rover's schedule of stuff to do).

They use Java for development. Here is a public version of a program they use for viewing data from the mars robots: maestro

Thus the joy of this installation. You just tell them that it's a program. "Program" sounds so much nicer than "OS."

If they won't let you do that... then you have to go old school. You must convince your parents that they need a newer and better system so you can run the Maestro java simulation to enjoy and learn from the current Mars experience. Suggestions like "I wanna be an astronaut, dad!" work well.

After they buy their new screaming P4 system, you take the old system and abuse the hell out of it installing every version of linux that you can find. (Which, of course, will get you closer to working with NASA than playing with the mastro software...)

Good luck.

AC

Maestro is a public version of the science operations tool for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover mission.

Look at the pictures like the gurus do.

Runs on java and crunches my machine... but man, does it give you that "I-am-a-NASA-engineer" feeling.

If you don't want to install that beast, you can feast your eyes on the Raw Image Gallery

AC

Posting true AC so not to Karma Whore.

The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.

The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.

The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.

The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.

The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.

The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.

The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.

The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.

Well, as a software engineer on MER, I must say that I and my collegues are all thrilled to see yet another success! NASA's Mars program has needed a success like this, and we are thrilled to get yet another chance to explore Mars.

I would like to thank all of the other engineers and scientists that have worked on this mission... many of which worked untold hours of unpaid overtime to do the things that the budgets couldn't afford (and that the mission couldn't live without).

I'd like to thank the leaders of our nation for giving us the resources to accomplish this feat, and their support politically.

But most importantly I'd like to thank the public for their interest, excitement, and moral/fiscal support. We're doing this for you and your children, that they might understand the universe better. Thanks for all of the fans out there!

Oh, and if you haven't already, now is a great time to grab Maestro, NASA's public science tool for visualizing mars data (which I helped to develop).

What a great night!

Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers

There's also been an update for the Maestro visualisation and planning thingy. I'm downloading it right now - let's get some more BitTorrent seeds up and running! :)

Hey Scott,

Since you went into a bit of detail about your work, I'll tell slashdot a little about RSVP's planning counterpart, Science Activity Planner.

Science Activity Planner is used by scientists for planning before the Science Operational Working Group meeting, in which the final plans are made on SAP.

Scientists can visualize doownlinked data products and create high-level plans which are then later converted to sequences by the sequencing team using RSVP and a few other tools (like MAPGEN).

RSVP is aimed towards the engineering aspects of seqwuencing, and has precise simulation, etc. SAP is aimed towards the scientific part of the process, that is designating high level targets, analysing data that's come down, and planning things in a somewhat rough level.

We also have a 3D visualization environment which isn't too bad (especially considering it's Java3D!) Our simulation is much rougher (but very fast) and is used to give scientists a good idea of what their plans will do, and leave the details to the sequencing team.

The public version of Science Activity Planner is known as Maestro and can be downloaded at Maestro Headquarters. It has essentially the same functionalities, however the data is significantly compressed, and of course the planning has had all the sensitive bits removed.

It's really amazing all the effort that goes into one day on mars, from examing the data to sending the final sequence. Too bad there's no public version of RSVP, otherwise everyone could see how awesome it is :)

Cheers,
Justin Wick,
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers

Get a copy of Maestro

It's the same software JPL uses to proccess the raw data.. Although its more of a "lite" version for home users

About every week they release a new data set which contains the raw data from the mission. You can view the images before they're colorized, zoom in and out, even view the terrain in 3D

It's written in java and works on

Windows XP/2000/98/Me
Mac OS X version 10.3 (Panther), with Java3D installed
Linux (recent versions)
Solaris (recent versions)

Does anybody else find it slightly amusing that Plone is running on Sun's network - on Sun hardware no less - and no Java in sight? ;)

http://mars.telascience.org/home

They have a data pack from gustav crater and will be updating it with more data packs as the rovers mission progresses.

I did notice that it was a hog of a program, it nearly brought my workstation to it's knees.

Maestro has that functionality built right in. They currently have one data pack released, with another likely today or tomorrow. The second data pack should be interesting. Since the rover is finally off the lander (allowing multiple perspectives) and they have gotten more time to download higher quality pics, the map should be more detailed.

Check it out!
adpowers

Heck, you can download the software yourself and drive a virtual version of the rover. For Windows, Linux, Solaris, and even Mac I think. And you can download actual photos/data from Spirit and have external 3d views.

You can even download via Bittorrent...those JPL guys are so nerdy it's great.

I downloaded and skimmed the manual but haven't tried it myself yet, but from the manual it's apparent you can view your rover in 3rd-person 3D.

All the conspiracy theorists are free to go grab the actual software that nasa scientists use to browse mission data... and get the full resolution un-corrected raw image data to boot, including some very nifty positional tracking stuff (tag a rock in one image, have it indicated on others) etc. 3d views, etc. Notice the images are not all color corrected and pretty, and don't really make you think "wow mars!"

If you use Maestro, you can download the actual original images as first seen by Spirit and the scientists at NASA.

• http://mars.telascience.org/downloads.html (for the Maestro application)
• http://mars.telascience.org/data1.html (for the first Maestro Mars data update)

• http://mars.telascience.org/downloads.html (for the Maestro application)
• http://mars.telascience.org/data1.html (for the first Maestro Mars data update)

mars.telascience.org is the webserver, not the irc server.

We've been Slashdotted! We'll bring up our original website as soon as we can. Meanwhile, here are links to Download Maestro:

• Maestro for Windows XP, 2000
• Maestro for Mac OS X Panther (requires Java3D)
• Maestro for Linux
• Maestro for Solaris

We've been Slashdotted! We'll bring up our original website as soon as we can. Meanwhile, here are links to Download Maestro:

• Maestro for Windows XP, 2000
• Maestro for Mac OS X Panther (requires Java3D)
• Maestro for Linux
• Maestro for Solaris

We've been Slashdotted! We'll bring up our original website as soon as we can. Meanwhile, here are links to Download Maestro:

• Maestro for Windows XP, 2000
• Maestro for Mac OS X Panther (requires Java3D)
• Maestro for Linux
• Maestro for Solaris

We've been Slashdotted! We'll bring up our original website as soon as we can. Meanwhile, here are links to Download Maestro:

• Maestro for Windows XP, 2000
• Maestro for Mac OS X Panther (requires Java3D)
• Maestro for Linux
• Maestro for Solaris