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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 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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Disclaimer: I'm a junior member of the Maestro Development team, however most of my work was on the mission version (SAP), not the public version.
The original specifications for Maestro (originally called WITS) contained an automatic updating client called MECS (Multimission Encrypted Communications System). I worked heavily on this the summer of 2002, and it was really great. It was going to work a bit like CVS in that it used deltas to transfer changes between versions of files, and had intelligent merging of XML content, etc. However due to funding constraints, the plug was pulled on MECS so there are no automatic updates.
There is a scientist version of SAP for use on personal computers that uses something called SAP-SYNC that automatically updates everything by comparing what's on client with server ahnd using LFTP, however it was theorized that the load on JPL's servers would be far to great to do that for all of our fans out there.
It was decided because of the massive budget cuts, little funding, and of course the fact that our staff has dropped down to all of three people to keep things simple. Doing things this way makes it possible to bittorrent things (I actually told them to bittorrent this for slashdotting about a year ago, however things have been so hectic here I"m not surprised they didn't!)
If you're interested in the design of MECS and how it was supposed to function, check out this paper.
As for the people complaining about the design, we don't really like it either! Write your congressman, get NASA outreach more funding, and we'll have things to really engage the population!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Support Staff
Mars Exploration Rovers