How NASA Will Bring the Phoenix Mars Mission To the Web

lgmac brings us a story about how NASA will bring information from the Phoenix Mars lander to the internet in the coming days. CIO Magazine speaks with JPL's chief knowledge architect and others about how they'll provide massive amounts of data from the lander to suit the needs of an audience ranging from professors to 8-year-olds. We've been discussing the Phoenix mission for quite a while now. The landing is on schedule for Sunday at roughly 5PM PDT. "'In previous missions, a system like this didn't exist and people were sharing images via external drives,' Bitter says. Some of the images are put up immediately and captioned, or sent to museum audiences, while others are made part of huge mosaic pictures that display the majesty of what the NASA spacecraft encounters, she says. In addition to the sheer volume of data that must be sifted through, challenges included the large, dispersed team, Holm says. 'The content management system has to be easy to use and agnostic,' she says, 'It's all about speed and accuracy of data.' Video on the Web represents one of the biggest changes for modern-day missions for the public, Holm says. 'There's a visceral response we get from people. They feel like they're really there.'"

Comments

And it's about time:

[Fluffeh]

It's about time NASA did some of this good old fashioned PR stuff. This sort of thing - just letting people get caught up in the awe of it all - is so much better than any other PR that they could possibly do.

A company that showed me something that they did, that let me get swept away by the sheer audacity of it? That let me be instantly teleported to some other planet in our solar system through amazing photographs? That let me stand on the surface of another planet - even if only in my mind?

Yeah, that's the sort of company that I can
Open my checkbook for.
Petition my local congressman/senator/governing body for.
Happily teach my kids about.
Generally go out of my way for.