Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How NASA Will Bring the Phoenix Mars Mission To the Web

Posted by Soulskill on from the real-time-feed-of-real-angry-martians dept.

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.'"

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. i remember the spirit landing by adpowers · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I remember watching Spirit land on Mars a few years ago. I streamed NASA TV over the internet and remember the anticipation of waiting for data and the excitement when the images finally began appearing on screen. It is a memory that is very fond to me and is still clear in my mind. Being too young to experience the moon landing, the Spirit landing and Columbia disaster are my strongest memories of the space program. Each represents the best and worst of the space exploration.

    I hope to be able to stream the Phoenix landing on Sunday.

    1. Re:i remember the spirit landing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      If the webcast is unavailable due to overwhelming demand (there's a lot of nerds out there...slashdotting sometimes even happens to NASA), you might try the local public access TV channel. The one here in Portland often picks up the NASA TV broadcast for major events like this, and they take it from the satellite broadcast, so NASA TV server bandwidth isn't a problem.

      If you're really hardcore, there's instructions on the NASA TV site for how to receive the digital satellite broadcast.