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Could Distributed.Net Help the Mars Polar Lander?
Anonymous Coward writes "This official JPL press release
describes the current attempt to listen for faint signals from the Mars Lander. They get three windows a day, and it takes 18 hours to process data because the signal is so weak (if it's really there). Too bad they don't have a deal with distributed.net." Interesting thought. Is anyone at distributed.net or JPL interested in pursuing it?
And now the good news: This project exists and is in the works. It is real and called goes by the name of "Cosm". Check it out.
They don't have a client yet, but there is a CVS server with code that is being developed as you read this.
The little green men find out about this and immediately begin encoding a trojan horse in the decoy signal that NASA's been detecting.
As thousands of clients crash throughout the planet, Linux enthusiasts eagerly point out that their machines not only can process the signal but even identify the byte code signature of the
trojan, without any ill effect.
This suggestion sounds more like the Seti@Home project - mass distributed computing power used to scan for signals.
The problem with the Seti project is that nothing is ever found. Nobody knows what they're looking for, and nobody knows what would be done if something were found. With a search for the Mars Lander however, everyone knows what the object of the game is. There's millions of quid/bucks worth of serious hardware out of reach for even those at NASA. Imagine the elation in the techno community if we actually found it for them again!
If distributed.net don't take it up, how about a Mars@Home project? I know I'd be one of the first to download.
insignificant sig
... If it only takes NASA 18 hours to proccess the signals and they have a limited number of signals to process, why the hell would they go through the trouble of setting up and coordinating a massive distributed effort? And people wonder where the money goes heh...
Listening for something that might actually be there? I'd donate my computer's cycles to that!
But really, I can't see any way that the existing d.net clients could be used to process signals, which means they'd have to write a new client and then redistribute it. That would probably take a lot of time. Plus, since the individual clients would be running on computers all over the world, isn't there the potential for error due to screwed up computers or deliberate tampering with the client? The d.net model is fine for something unimportant like RC5, but a sensitive multimillion dollar project might want a more well thought out system.
No. No. No.
Bloat in the Government isn't feeding the hungry or finding shelter for the homeless. It isn't even putting computers into ghetto Schools or removing graffiti.
Bloat is when founds are sought and allocated for those things but don't get there. Bloat is when you have a $50,000,000 "Urban renewal" project for downtown and this project establishes offices on the other, more affluent side of town. Then manages to run up $17,000,000 in "Administrative Expenses" before any actual work gets done on replacing the condemned buildings downtown.
Bloat is when constructing an office building costs a private business $3 Million and a smaller, simpler, less durable building costs the Government $8 Million.
In short bloat is not about what is done with our money but rather when *nothing* is done.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Where did the insane guy get a cardboard box? From a refrigerator designed with space-age technology, of course!
Throwing money at the poor has been tried before, look at FDR's "New Deal" and LBJ's "Great Society", so, if that worked, we sholdn't have any more insane guys in cardboard boxes to worry about.
Technological advance is the only way to alleviate the effects of poverty, because you can't eat money. Money by itself is useless, it's the warm clothes, food, and medicine that matter. To produce more of those, at lower cost, we need a more advanced technology.
Then you will say: "let's invest in developing those technologies, instead of space exploration!" But it will not work. If you check any textbook on multi-dimension function optimization you will see why. Following the hill climbing approach blindly will get you trapped on the nearest local peak. If you want to minimize the cost of one particular technology, then you must pursuit other, even unrelated, technologies. If we had never done that, we would have now the absolutely most perfect stone axes imaginable, but nothing made of metal.
"I'm sorry, I don't see why this is a news story. Roblimo, It would take weeks for d.net to implement a new module, not to mention coding it..."
The point here is to get people thinking about the idea. This is not "News for Nerds" as much as it's "Stuff that matters."
Imagine a versatile, rather than single-purpose, "idle cycle" processing network that could be adapted rapidly to take on new tasks - like searching for low-power signals from out-of-touch spacecraft or comparing large numbers of telescope observations to help find small, moving images like asteroids and comets.
I'm sure there are many other potential uses for "idle cycle" distributed computing. I don't think it hurts to free up our imaginations now and then and brainstorm a bit about them.
If nothing else, a little speculation about the use of distributed computing to help NASA is a welcome relief from all the lawsuit and privacy and domain dispute stories that seem to make up a depressingly large percentage of the news submitted to Slashdot lately.
Remember the First Rule of Slashdot: "No matter what you say, someone won't like it - and will tell you so. Loudly."
- Robin
Just FWIW, CPU cycles may not be what's limiting the data analysis - it may be tweaking the reduction algorithms and re-iteration, which requires a lot of human intervention. Back when I was an astronomer, this was 90% of the battle with certain sets of data - taking out unwanted dark currents, dealing with strange flat images, bias levels that changed with position on the sky. I almost went insane with one set of data from the Curtis Schmidt at CTIO. Ugh.
<rant>
It pisses me off to the extreme when the United States media, the government, and people like you state with some sort of authority that NASA has some sort of bad "track record." Let's look at what's going on here. NASA launched over a dozen missions last year. How many failed? I can think of two. But the prevailing attitude towards the pursuit of science in this country is one of apathy. New discoveries? Blah. New planets found? don't waste my time. Cure for cancer? Good for them. Multi-million dollar space missions fails? Now that is news! Because of this attitude exhibited by the likes of people like you, the media has made NASA look like a bunch of fools. Do you have any idea what goes into sending something to Mars? How could you possibly think these missions would be 100% successful? They can't be. What this leads to is a general malaise concerning NASA when it comes to the American public. So we end up with less funding for them and more funding for useless liberal fedbloat. I pray for the day when the Average Joe will be aware of the technical sophistication and sheer American Ingenuity(tm) that goes into NASA projects, and exactly how beneficial these have been to the United States, nay, the World as a whole. You are a victim of the media; or your own foolishness; or both.
</rant>
NASA is pretty famous for not having any computing power.
Distributed.net has a great record of getting new clients (like OGR) out in a timely manner.
I have a great bridge for sale. It's in New York, and has a great location. Serious inquiries only.
I've just intercepted a signal from the Mars Polar Lander. Here it is..... "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Oh well, I guess we'll never get in touch with it now....
So we end up with less funding for them and more funding for useless liberal fedbloat. I pray for the day when the Average Joe will be aware of the technical sophistication and sheer American Ingenuity(tm) that goes into NASA projects, and exactly how beneficial these have been to the United States, nay, the World as a whole. You are a victim of the media; or your own foolishness; or both
I smiled when I read this. Naturally many grandiose arguments can be made about the relative importance of discovering new planets circling distant suns (that is to say, confirming something we all more of less knew anyway) versus keeping, for example, several million impoverished families in warm clothes, food, and medicine for a year (that would be the 'useless liberal fedbloat' I suppose).
The fact is, that neither of these projects can go begging in a society that has long term hopes for itself. I'd agree with your general sentiments that these projects are important and deserve funding, but that's relative to our lifestyles. Personally I'm guessing my priorities might shift a little if my own physical survival were on the budget table for negotiation. The vague hope that someday humans will set foot upon the soil of a foreign planet seems rather unimportant when the insane guy in the next cardbox box keeps trying to steal your blanket.
Was it Dostoevsky who said "Boots are better than novels"? I always liked that quote.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
It really worries me that this gets a score of interesting, when it bears no relation to the reality of the story.
The post on slashdot says 3 windows a day, the
article says 3, 30 minute windows per day. That means they require to process the data in roughly
7 and a half hours, even without assuming time to formulate a useful signal.
18 hours a day processing time means they miss 2 potential windows. If an infrastructure was in place that would allow distributed clients to be quickly assembled and spread this could be potentially useful. I doubt that this can be done in this case. This does not preclude it being useful in the future.
There is already effort by ex distributed.net people to put such an infrastructure in place.
Check out cosm for such a project.