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NASA Releases Mars Data for Maestro
The Maestro Team writes "The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has released the first Mars data update for Maestro, containing images just received from the Spirit Mars rover. Maestro is the public version of the actual tool used by the mission scientists to operate the rover. You can download Maestro and the latest Mars images from the official Maestro site, and join the developers and other users in #maestro on irc.freenode.net."
Now we just need to sent it looking for that British probe.
http://torrent.andrewhitchcock.org/files/Maestro-U pdate01-Windows.exe.torrent
--
What is the sound of this sentence?
I spent all that time building my own rover, hoping, nay - praying, for this to happen. It's nice to finally be able to do something with it other than cover up the crab grass on my lawn.
Get your your bittorrent files here:
Maestro for Windows & Mars Dataset #1
Maestro for Linux & Mars Dataset #1
(tar -xzvf dataset immediately above your "JPL" directory)
Maestro for Solaris & Mars Dataset #1
(tar -xzvf dataset immediately above your "JPL" directory)
Maestro for Mac & Mars Dataset #1
(Requires Java3D)
Maestro User's Guide (pdf)
BitTorrent stats
Provide feedback to these folks: maestro [at] telascience [dot] org
I can't wait to start exploring. On the advice of some other /.ers yesterday I grabbed maestro early. Looks like it was a good thing I did...
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Maestro is the public version of the actual tool used by the mission scientists to operate the rover.
So I'm guessing this public version of the tool used to operate the rover lacks some capabilities, like the ability to operate the rover?
Downloaded it and its pretty cool lookin... it's neat to see the pre-processed raw images. They even have a 3d model of the rover and its surroundings (however the rendering process makes everything EXTREMELY dissying). What puzzled me though is that Maestro is written in Java and a java application can be run on any virtual machine that has the necessary files therefore preventing seperate OS editions, but for some reason this has separate douwnloads for Linux/Solaris, Windows, and OSX. Hmm... anyway looking forward to the next data pack!
These are the kinds of things that will interest people in space exploration again. Although the site is "conserving bandwidth", and didn't have as much info as I would like available right this second, the idea that I can be reviewing the data returned by the Mars rovers at the same time as NASA's scientists is really, really appealing.
This is the kind of thing that makes people seriously consider careers in science. Imagine a father and son (or mother and daughter) pouring over this info together, comparing their take with NASA's. That's super exciting.
Maybe one of the kids downloading Maestro today will take the first steps on Mars tomorrow...
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
We (the Maestro team) hope you all really enjoy Maestro. Don't forget to join us in our chat channel (#maestro in mars.telascience.org) and send us your comments at maestro (at) telascience (dot) org.
Heh. I assure you that steps were taken to ensure that Maestro will pose no risk whatsoever to the mission. We were careful about that. :)
The sensitive code that could've compromised the mission was removed from the public release.
I love this program. I have never felt so close to space exploration as I do when I'm poking around it.
It is an awe inspiring mission and this software practically lets you touch it.
Heres an interesting quote from their "Conductor" guided tour of the dataset, which is extensive and shows you EVERYTHING they have on the mission so far.
(emphasis mine)
The images shown here were among the first to arrive from Mars. The Navcam image on top was taken before the rover mast was deployed. The rover's high-gain antenna can be seen on the left side of the image. It was this image, loaded in the mission version of Maestro, that gave the scientists their first glimpse of where Spirit had landed.
liqbase
man the pictures i have seen so far are absolutley amazing. I cant wait to get a lot more. Here is to a long life for the rovers. Maestro is pretty slick.
This is somewhat offtopic (apologies in advance), but I've heard that some museums / science centers are going to be building realistic Mars terrain models, and replica rovers are going to travel the country. Interactive exhibits are planned where visitors can control the replica as it moves across the fake Mars terrain. Download maestro now to practice!
Maybe if we all pull "left" at the same time...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Second I think it is real cool that some of the key people in the project / science team at NASA are women. Maybe this will help in that department as well, we sure need their brain power in the tech sector.
Help fight continental drift.
No, they can't. If Slashdot starts deleting troll posts and crapfloods they're participating in active censorship which is one thing they're committed to avoid. Slashdot is a social experiment in total freedom of speech with zero "true" moderation. Meaning you take the good with the bad. The intelligent discussion with the GNAA. The interesting comments with the crapfloods.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
There is a filter for dupe messages, but it has to be the exact same message, notice all the GNAA posts have a random number at the bottom. Expext the dupe post filter to become a bit fuzzier soon. Now only if there were a dupe filter for the editors too... :p
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Those insensitive clods gave us insensitive code!
hate titty pee colon slash slash
Sure, it may not be solving some of the current problems, as you have brought up, but a better understanding of the universe is sure to have paybacks, even though they may not be immediate or blindingly obvious.
If the Mars rovers do find evidence of past life, however unlinkely it is, it will change everything.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Saeed,
The Mars Rover program is the most recent expression of an old human need, to explore and to understand. Your arguments could be used to disparage all pure science, pure mathematics, and other human pursuits without immediate practical application, but they are much of what makes us human. Along the way, technology gets advanced in ways that produce the famous "spinoff" that eventually improve the lives of many people.
Think of the advances in autonomous robotics that are on display with the rovers! These little beings are out there, 10 light minutes away, and able to handle many situations for themselves safely. Robots with capabilities like these will help with oil recovery in the deep ocean, work in nuclear power plants, assist surgeons, and many other activities.
In my opinion, and of many others, the ISS is a white elephant, that has no purpose to speak of at present. It is diverting huge amounts of funds from much more important scientific pursuits, like robotic solar system exploration. On to Mars, the asteroids, and beyond!
My $.02
Fine then, but for those of us who browse at 0, page spill 50, theres a nice little message at the bottom that currently says 252 replies beneath your current threshold. :p
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Do you like vacations? Think of this as a holiday for mankind. Instead of reading about the latest suicide bomber in Hebron you get to see pics of another planet. It won't make problems go away, but you need a break once in a while.
And, if you're an american you paid for this - I can't think about a better use of my tax dollars, especially when I see that they're being spent on shit that pisses the hell out of me.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Fucking amazing. I went to the main page and right now it says "50 of 633 comments". Wow.
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
Someone get the biggest wlan signal booster they can find and ship it in a freighter to the Arecibo observatory while I install this baby on a laptop. Ever had an RC car whose control frequency interfered with something? Think bigger. >:)
Hate me!
Since when did the government care to provide Linux support? NASA is truely the exception to the rule.
>>How does this advance Man in ways that benefit the body, the Family of Man? By making us more knowledgable. I'm aware that that response probably sounds flippant but I'm really not sure what more needs to be said.
Until I change these bits thusly.
Now, off we go to resuce the Beagle! Special thanks to MovieOS for making this possible.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
swim down
Sometimes, I can't help but wonder that we humans are like viruses, we just reproduce/replicate endlessly. So what happens next when we take over Mars?
Anyway, on the mars rover finding life, I always wonder, why do we think life exists ON mars, how about IN mars, beneath the planet, the surface looks dead, what is under all that? I wonder if the rover has a mic, I do love to hear what it is like out there. probably nothing, but who knows? are there winds? etc,
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Where is Bill Nye's Marsdial? Thats what I want to see.
That was on this probe right?
I think this calls for a great collection of Mars rover political cartoons from the various newspapers: http://cagle.slate.msn.com/news/Mars2004/main.asp
Ah yes. I am getting this Maestro thingy at 11.1Mbps. Heh. OC-12 to Abilene....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
*Defense* spending gave us the Internet -- and thereby an unbelievable boost w/ communications that benefits all humanitarian endeavors.
That said, spending a fraction of that on efforts to increase human knowledge and understanding (rather than bombs and bodies) is even more likely to have a profound positive effect on culture and our species.
"Sometimes, I can't help but wonder that we humans are like viruses, we just reproduce/replicate endlessly."
And sometimes I can't help but wonder how people can think they can quote movies and others will think it's their own thoughts rather than a script writers.
I think this quote pretty much sums it up:
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Sometimes, I can't help but wonder that we humans are like viruses, we just reproduce/replicate endlessly.
Humans, viruses, and every other life form.
Sometimes I cannot help but wonder why anyone would assume that every thought someone has is directly in resulting from pop culture.
Sleep is for the weak.
Believe me, astronomers do think about this -- why do we do what we do? What benefit do we give society? I will give some of the standard answers. The first (that others have covered) is spinoff technology. Digital cameras contain technology (CCDs) that astronomers have been using for 20 years or so now. X-ray machines at airports, MRIs, etc. came from astronomy/physics. Some other types of medical imaging use similar techniques (and software) that radio astronomers use. The second is that humans have this insatiable curiosity about the universe around us. We spend money on these explorations because the public wants to know! Astronomy stories make the cover of the NY Times, CNN, and your local news outlet not because the average person derives any benefit out of knowing the value of Hubble's constant, but because people are happy to know that someone, somewhere is trying to find out where we all came from and why we are here. Personally, I and some of my colleagues feel that it is important to use the appeal of astronomy to generate an interest in science in general. You suck people in by showing them pictures of planetary nebulae, and when they are awed by the pretty colors, you slip in some teaching about electromagnetism. NASA spends 1 - 2% of their budget on education and outreach efforts (small fraction, large amount of real dollars). They use the power that astronomy has to generate interest with people who normally don't care about science to try and impress on them that science and technology are good. So you can argue that the success of NASA missions is indirectly responsible for keeping the federal funding for *all* sciences at a reasonable level. Now you just have to decide if you think federal funding of any science is worthwhile.
Well, I really hope that people won't be scared away from Maestro because of all the rubbish posted here. It certainly killed any useful discussion before it could start. It's a pity - we worked very hard on Maestro, and I think that there are a lot of people out there who would enjoy it.
:) ). Does this happen often? How is it usually dealt with? It seems like in situations like this the editors might consider just pulling the article and posting it again later.
:(
I'm very new to Slashdot (ok, ok, I joined just so I could announce Maestro
Of course, I don't see how anyone could even FIND this post considering the company it will be keeping.. oh well!
Jeff Norris
Maestro Team Lead
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
You said "The first (that others have covered) is spinoff technology. Digital cameras contain technology (CCDs) that astronomers have been using for 20 years or so now. X-ray machines at airports, MRIs, etc"
While the space program has had many many spinoffs, MRI is not one of them. MRI was due to the work of I. I. Rabi and colleagues in the 30's and 40's, not the space race. MRI would have been developed whether we left the Earth or not.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Does it come with source code? A program is of little use to me unless I can hack on it.
Got Code?
Can this program be used a Windows/MacOS X/Linux screen saver to collect images? I'd love to show this program off at work. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
JPL-Jeff, don't be discouraged by the nonsense posted on slashdot from time to time -- your message is easily caught from amongst the "crapflood." Regardless, trust in the slashdot moderators, hopefully they'll keep things in check.
Moreover, trust that your link will be getting all the attention it needs. I noticed your download links far up in the discussion (inside the crapflood taht is), and I'm sure others have as well.
Hopefully the moderators will be on the ball tonight -- at least they can easily see where the spam is.
No worries though, you've got an awesome piece of software, and I'm as eager as anybody to see it in action.
Thanks!
Sorry -- I should have been more explicit. I wasn't trying to imply that the space program produced MRI, but that MRI was a spinoff of basic science research that wasn't searching for an application. I may have this wrong too, but it is accepted lore with most astronomers that I know. Correct me if I'm still wrong.
Once the rich and careless are done using up this planet like so much toilet paper, they are going to need somewhere else to go. Expect a dozen or so decades of manned explorations, then some kind of terraforming breakthrough. The rich and careless don't worry about the environment on Earth because they know they aren't going to be here and neither are their lineage. It's all part of the master plan...
Viva la revolucion komandante!!
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I asked JPL-jeff on IRC about it and his answer was:
gozu - I don't have the numbers in front of me. It's like about 15 Mbits of products per day on the HGA, more like 180 Mbits per day on the UHF if we do all the orbiter passes.So it averages out to 2.3 Kbps! Of course, this is in bursts so the real speeds are higher than this. But still...It's shocking.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/java3d andjavaadvancedimagingupdate.html
It doesn't specifically tell you, but if you try to fire up Maestro without Java3D, nothing happens.
As it is, this is a quality Java app -- reminds me of old *quality* Encarta multimedia footage (back in oh... 1998 or so). Just better. :-)
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
http://forums.xandros.com/viewtopic.php?t=4233
This is a post about getting it to work on Xandros Linux, but people using other distros with newer versions of libstdc++ may have the same problem, so you may need to symbolically link the libstdc library on your unit to the version the software calls for as well.
The software is a PIG. Its a Java application and even on my 3.0Ghz HP graphics workstation with a Quadro4 graphics card, its slow and a major memory hog. Still, Its pretty cool.
The most obvious and direct answer to the question asked is that it produces the tools and techniques to expand the dominion of Man in much the same way that the first primitive rafts made offshore resources and eventually the entire Earth available to Man.
The question you are intimating: "why should space exploration be a priority when people here on Earth are still starving, dying and living in mistery?" Is much more challenging and I don't know that I can offer a really good answer except that, as a species, we have an urge to explore and expand and that, as priorities go, exploration ranks a lot higher than say bombing third-world countries.
To put things in perspective, the US military spends the equivalent of entire cost of the Beagle 2 mission every 45 minutes and NASA's yearly budget every two weeks. How does that expenditure contribute to the advancement of Man or even the specific men it is ostensibly in aid of?
I agree that priorities are messed up. I just disagree about which ones.
Okay, I'll bite. I'm seeing a stream of "What use is this?" and "big deal, more red rocks" comments on the Rover topics, and I can't even imagine where these are coming from:
- If a big meteorite/virus/climate change/radiation storm/solar instability/nuclear catastrophe/nanotech grey goo/ was to wipe out the entire human population on Earth, the human race isn't going to come back. Forever, for all of eternity (or at least the heat death of the universe, which is what current theory predicts as the human race's equivalent of dying of old age). Surely we should pay *something* to take out an insurance policy against this scenario? A policy which aims for human settlements on Mars?
- Getting to these settlements in incredibly hard, and there's no way we can suddenly decide to do it one day and make them happen the next year. It'll take large number of intermediate steps, including unmanned missions, $400m rovers which produce photographs of red rocks, and, when we can, manned missions.
- I know you aren't saying this, but to those who call these photographs "boring red rocks", they are incredibly exciting to anyone with any sense of what they represent. For one, we've had to have 2.5 billion years of evolution before any life form on Earth is able to see them. Their size, shape, distribution, constitution, layout ask a thousand questions, some of which the Rover will answer. These answers will help in resolving important scientific questions of meaning to planetology here on Earth.
- Even if none of these reasons carry weight, we should do it, to paraphrase a mountaneer, because Mars is there. The purpose of life cannot be to just be to spend everything we have in finding the cure to AIDS and cancer and making it longer. What do we do with this longer life? I cannot imagine a more inspiring way to spend it than to find adventure in the rest of the universe. NASA keeps doing these things which make me proud to be human, and by spending your tax dollars to support it, you are creating and participating in this adventure.
Finally, I'm in India, not the US, so you could argue that it's not my tax money which is paying for this. That is true, but NASA has added to my life in many ways, from the days when as a small kid, I stayed awake nights listening for news updates on the Apollo 11 mission (India didn't have TV back then), to ogling these marvellous Mars photographs and imagining I'm a space traveller using Maestro to investigate a new planet. If someone knows a way a non-American can pay NASA back by sending over pittances when I can, I'll be happy to find a way to do it.Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park (Moab, Utah)?
Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:
intermediate details
advanced details
I believe Juanita
Consider a Mars base on the planet and not orbiting around it. Humans on the base will experience a low gravity environment all the time. Babies born on the base will grow to be a lot taller and a lot weaker than Earth babies.
When we move on to the next planet (say we find a lot of geothermal activity on Neptune keeping it warm), we will have to deal with other issues. The constraints of the living environment may dictate a different (but tolerable) gaseous composition, say mostly CO2 and O2 with no N2. Neptune babies may grow to develop different lung structures (not evolution, but just adaptation) in addition to being super-strong midgets because of the gravity.
Mars-raised humans will be different enough from Neptune-raised humans that we may have difficulty building any sort of kinship. Mars-raised humans will probably not be able to deal with Earth's gravity and much less Neptune's gravity and artificial atmosphere.
How are we going to relate to these creatures of the "same species"? Will we even connect or care about them, much less think about what is "beneficial to the entire species"?
My wife agrees with you, she says that at the very least this is the stuff that inspires our children to discover new things, to be the on the edge that discovers the new technologies, to be the Einstein's of our age, with new ideas we can only dream about. I guess I'm just a bit disappointed that with the billions of dollars out there, hard science that addresses social issues has such a low priority.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
here here. well said.
Even the tutorial which usually bugs the hell outta me was convenient. I actually like the raw images better, gives it more of an "exploratory" feel :) Fun fun fun.
Well, I guess this post is one of the many ways NASA and US as a whole, can be paid back for all the great things they are doing for mankind. I am sure they would take it over any $ amount you can send.
"No. People may have valid reasons to post as AC."
Never said kill it all together, I said kill it until the crapflood dies.
"Derp de derp."
Didn't realize I had a fan.
"Derp de derp."
I saw in excess of 1000 comments, but when I checked initially with my usual filtering I only saw 70 or 80. The rest were clearly spam in the purest sense of the word (check them, they surely were made automatically).
It is the first time I see something that vicious here, I wonder if it is a bunch of different machines 0wn3d by a cracker posting each comments as ACs (thus making too laborious to block based on IP address...).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes, they did There are internationally developed protocols for this.
This story has received 1220 comments, including this one.
Total crapflood comments: 996
Comments discussing the crapflood: 59
Comments scored at -1 (not included above): 27
Legitimate, on-topic comments: 138
Distribution of comment scores:
Score Crap- Discuss Non- Total
flood Crap- Crap-
flood flood
-1 996. 21. 27. 1,044.
0 0. 10. 36. 46.
1 0. 16. 33. 49.
2 0. 9. 38. 47.
3 0. 1. 7. 8.
4 0. 0. 4. 4.
5 0. 2. 20. 22.
(sorry about the periods. The lameness filter made me put them in.)
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