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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."
I wonder how much notice they'll take of suggested plans though? Might be cool to watch though and see what Mars looks like, though.
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
I think we just /.ed Mars...
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
Overall Looks like an interesting idea, they should look into putting it in schools. Could be a very educational "toy" to play with.
"After I'm dead, I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one." - Cato the Elder, aka Marcu
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.
Oh my, I think Dave just turned into a bear.
Is the site's web server running on the lander, or the orbiter?
And could someone post a torrent file?
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.
The linux hacker
so when does it land GMT, 8:35 PST is 8 hours behind right ?
All I needed to do was ssh to mars.rover.org and I can see a curses version of the 3D mars landscape. Fuel packs are depicted as % symbols. The rover is depicted as an @ sign.
No, wait, come to think of it, that's nethack. A very good program to take up if you're one of the folks working with the Beagle2.
Anyone can download Maestro for free from mars.telascience.org and use it to follow along with the rovers' progress during the mission.
Thanks to Slashdot, downloading Maestro also provides a vividly real simulation of the long months of space travel between Earth and Mars.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The site is sluggish already (darn subscribers), any chance of getting a torrent? I've already grabbed the files, I'll be glad to send them to anybody with a static IP willing to set up a tracker.
This looks like a lot of fun, though. Big thanks to the folks on the Maestro Team!
Fantastic. It's the one in the "1 in 6" to make it, and it's just going to sit there quivering trying to figure out which of 1000 commands to follow!
("Back away from the reply button!" It's a joke. And yes, I've had people reply to jokes 'correcting' me and then amazingly get modded 'insightful' for it.)
Please help metamoderate.
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska!
Forget about the science, just have a couple of teams racing across the Martian landscape. We can call it Marscar.
Well, the root password part is nasty but what kind of porn image exactly is it? ;-)
Where's the "Kaboom"? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering "Kaboom". My Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator?! That Earth-creature has stolen the Space Modulator!!!!
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
hold on Beagle 2 team! I'll explore Mars, see what happened to Beagle 2, and fix it ASAP!
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Looks like we Beagle2'd(crashed) the server ^_^
What they don't tell you up front is that if you actually want to run your own mission, you're going to have to pony up at least $100 million to buy a probe of your own. NASA stands to make a pretty penny if they sucker many people to buy into this scheme.
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.
NASA has axed at least one shuttle replacement/supplement project for non-financial reasons. Or rather, they had to pick something to axe, and they thought perhaps it was cheaper to keep flying the shuttle at $500 million a launch than to develop something more rational.
It's true that NASA is not funded as well as perhaps it should. But the problem is that they have no concept of the idea of doing things halfway. Whenever they are asked for a proposal or budget estimate for nearly any subject at all, they pretty much respond with a plan which culminates in landing men on Mars and costs $500 billion. "Propose a shuttle replacement and give a cost estimate." "We will build the replacement, proposed design here, use it to assemble a giant ship in orbit, and then fly to Mars! Total cost: $500 billion! What a bargain!"
Ok, so this is a bit of an exaggeration, but the idea is right. NASA is incapable of working with less than an ideal amount of money. They repeatedly make ridiculous budget requests and then do a terrible job when they are forced to make do with only half the money.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Major Scientific Post regarding Mars, and half the comments are arguing as to whether a link is or is not goatse. WTF happened to slashdot???
You can only cut back so much before you just don't have enough resources to get the job done. Some things can't be done halfway. In space flight doing something halfway gets you the challenger and columbia accidents.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
That's not gas, tha's water!!!!! LIFE !!! We've introduced life !!!! We infected Mars.. oh well, might as well start the 'management' of the Martian landscape now, why wait? Should an obviously viral lifeform be allowed to escape the gravity well?
I call computer-illiteracy job security
http://torrent.andrewhitchcock.org/files/Maestro-W in.exe.torrent
That is all I have been able to grab so far. I'll try to grab the OS X and Solaris(?) ones next. Someone already posted a Linux mirror, so that is less of a priority.
If anyone already has the files, you can use my tracker if you like:
andrewhitchcock.org:6969/
Andrew
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.
NO im not kidding, got this trying to dl the software:
O , line 44, in new_publishP lone/skins/plone_content/document_view.pt' (Also, an error occurred while attempting to render the standard error message.)
Site Error
An error was encountered while publishing this resource.
IOError
Sorry, a site error occurred.
Traceback (innermost last):
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 163, in publish_module_standard
Module Products.PlacelessTranslationService.PatchStringI
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 127, in publish
Module Zope.App.startup, line 205, in zpublisher_exception_hook
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 100, in publish
Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 88, in mapply
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 40, in call_object
Module Products.CMFCore.PortalContent, line 116, in __call__
Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 252, in __call__
Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 283, in _bindAndExec
Module Products.CMFCore.FSPageTemplate, line 155, in _exec
Module Products.CMFCore.FSObject, line 115, in _updateFromFS
Module Products.CMFCore.FSPageTemplate, line 84, in _readFile
IOError: [Errno 24] Too many open files: '/usr/local/Zope-2.7-head/lib/python/Products/CMF
they have links available now 4 of them!!!! not too bad for a buncha geeks... :)))))
tx to whoever answered their call for help
I call computer-illiteracy job security
The NASA server is back online - guess we'll land after all!
Maestro Headquarters
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
Maestro email#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
2 GHz laptop with lots of RAM and HD.
One simple rule for its versus it's
For those interested, the installer script is called 'install-Maestro' and has a few bugs in it. For one it wants 'rsync' but it does not properly check for its presence. Then if not found it will try to use 'rsync' that it thinks is included in the tarball. Alas whomever packaged it did not include rsync. Then it tries to use 'pwd' and combine its output with the $install variable which produces things like '/home/user/./R2004_01-Public-Linux/SAP/bim' path names. The '.' in the middle kills the process. When you edit the script to make it call rsync properly (you have to get your own rsync installed) it will install. Then you have to make sure that /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 is on your system because the included Java VM wants one. I just symlinked my /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 to it.
Beware though, this is a Java application and performance is predictably terrible even with OpenGL accelleration.
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
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
We've got Windows and Linux torrents, but could some kind soul provide the OS X torrent? Or does everyone hate us mac-heads?
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
I finally was able to download the winXP/2k version. Installation is quick and clean. From there on it gets downright cheesy looking - the Java command window stays open, and the interface looks like something we'd make in my High School computer science class. Oh, and it crashes when you try to view 3D images. My home-built hyperthreading P4 (half gig of DDR400, 128 MB DDR video card) crashed twice trying to manipulate the 3D images. The only times it's ever crashed! Yes, we do have to manually download data from Spirit from the NASA website. I doubt they'll be releasing THAT today or tomorrow...
It would come with windows.
God spoke to me
We backed off to a REALLY simple single page site that will allow you to download the software (and that's it). The site seems to be holding up to the traffic, so if you got scared off by a dead server before, come on back! Big thanks to the people who put up BitTorrents for us - this is our first slashdotting and we clearly didn't know what were getting into. We're making arrangements for a bigger pipe and more mirrors, and we'll be back for another Slashdotting when we make the first data release. Jeff Norris Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Come chat with the Maestro developers and other users in #maestro on irc.freenode.net. We're landing in just a few hours - come celebrate with us.
Jeff
"Right, now the spacecraft health is excellent. We have good attitude -- keeping the solar panels pointed at the Sun and the antennas pointed at Earth. We have good power through the solar panels, good communications at 120 bps."
ok, I swear i won't bitch about 26400 bps again....
Buenas Noches,
Soy estudiante Ingles (Frances e Historia a la universidad de Warwick) y quiero entender el punto de vista oficial de la republica Cuba sobre su existencia y su tratamiento por el mundo occidental, especialmente por los estados unidos. He aprehendido el Espanol por algunos anos pero no suficientes para entenderlo totalmente. Existe un sitio Internet para que los extranjeros que no hablan el espanol puedan estudiar para que exista el estado cubano actual?
Is here http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120 289.
Of course, the fact that the ease of installing software on MS, the many openings, and the lack of security does not escape the attention of others.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
20:35 PST == 11:35 EST? Only if EST is == GMT rather than -5.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Thanks for the heads-up, AstroDabb!
My MDK 9.2 is running Maestro perfectly!
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Hey, check your dictionary. Both are allowed. And quit using LOL unnecessarily - didn't you read that article posted on /. a couple days ago?!
They got tones back and sounds indicating that the chute has released and it is bouncing across the surface. They've currently lost contact but say thats normal.
I know this isn't a "Maestro" help area, but I'll post anyway...
I've loaded Maestro and tried out "Go to ISIL test facility" with success, but when I go to "Go to "Spirit's Landing Site", I get "you have not yet loaded data from Spirit, return to Maestro website to download ...". What do I do now? Where do I get the data?
I have no idea what the process would be for non-Linux versions. There's an FAQ on j3d here if anyone needs help.
same error here. any word on a fix?
You can only cut back so much before you just don't have enough resources to get the job done.
Just curious: Do you believe this applies to software development in general?
Yes, you can cut back anything to a point, sacrificing extra items that would be nice to have and adding extra time to the project. But there is a point where you can not make any meaningful progress.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important