Explore Mars with Maestro

The Maestro Team writes "NASA has released Maestro, a public version of the primary software tool used by scientists to operate the Mars Exploration Rovers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Anyone can download Maestro for free from mars.telascience.org and use it to follow along with the rovers' progress during the mission. You can use Maestro to view pictures from Mars in 2D and 3D and create simplified rover activity plans. During the mission, updates will be released for Maestro containing the latest images from Mars."

Comments

Neat idea

[obey13]

Maybe this is just the uber geek in me speaking, but am the only one that thinks this is a remarkably neat idea. Not to meantion that it might win the space agency a couple of P.R. points.

For those bound to complain re: NASA's performance

[the man with the pla]

The problem is that NASA doesn't have the same backing as it did back in the 60's. We went to the moon because it was a priority, and a lot of money and effort was thrown at it. Now NASA is constantly struggling to make as much as they can out of a diminishing budget. I believe that this, more than anything else caused the accident.

If you are an administrator at NASA and you are told that their might be a problem with the age of the fleet and you know the odds of getting funding for a new project are near zero, do you keep that fleet flying? Of course. That's hardly the safest thing to do, but it's either that or close up shop and go work the chinese space program.

NASA puts safety as first as it can afford to. You can argue that NASA is an inefficent bureaucracy, but we seem to have no trouble financing the inefficent military bureaucracy. It's the nature of government, cope.

Software Updates for Images?!

[ClubStew]

What a poor design! They have to update the software in order to get new images? That's got to be the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. Did they forget that the Internet exists where you can update images and indexes automatically? Sheesh.

Help!

[JPL-Jeff]

Well, we just discovered how NOT ready we were for Slashdot. Is there any hope of getting ahold of a Slashdot editor and arranging for temporary relief? If we can get an hour or so to put up some mirrors and bittorrent links, then I'll think we'll be ready for you.

Re:Installers

[AstroDrabb]

Ok, bone head, I'll bite. The downloads are so big because they INCLUDE a JRE. Mac users need to download Java3D, not Java. The Linux install is actaully EASIER then the Mac install since there are no extra downloads.

Here are the steps for MS Windows.
Download file which includes a JRE.
Double click file and install
(the easiest of all systems, but only by one step)
Done

Here are the steps for Linux.
Download file which includes a JRE.
Doubl click it in Nautilus to open it (It is a tar file and will open in FileRoller which is no different then opening a zip file in WinZip.)
Extract the contents to where ever you please
In Nautilus just double click the install-Maestro file to install.
Done.

Only ONE more step the under MS Windows. You CAN make a self extracting and installing archive for Linux just as you can for MS Windows (this is one of the ways that Sun distributes Java for Linux. The people who made these installs chose not to. Maybe LEARN how to do something BEFORE you shoot your mouth off. Most Linux users won't use the simple point-n-click method I outlined above. Why? Because many love the command line and find it easier and faster. So the steps a command line lover might have followed would have been

tar -zxf Maestro-Linux.tar.gz
cd R2004*
sh install-Maestro
done