Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
Its red. It has rocks.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
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
#
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 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
Is here http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120 289.
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?
There has not been a sprit release yet. There is one coming in a few days. You can't go to Spirit's Landing Site yet.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner / Maestro Support Staff
Mars Exploration Rovers