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NASA Achieves Data Goals For Mars Rover With Open Source Software

Posted by Soulskill on from the open-curiosity dept.

caseyb89 writes "Open source projects Nginx, Railo CMS, and GlusterFS are powering Mars Curiosity's big data crunching. 'Taken together, the combination of cloud and open source enabled the Curiosity mission to provide beautiful images in real time, not months delayed; at high quality, not "good enough" quality. A traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility.'"

11 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. This is all about the PR end of the system by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    This has nothing to do with processing the data from the rover (which comes in at rates a dial-up modem could handle). It's about the web hosting system that lets casual visitors look at the pretty pictures.

    NASA could just upload the stills to Flickr and the videos to Youtube and save some money.

    1. Re:This is all about the PR end of the system by 0racle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's about the web hosting system that lets casual visitors look at the pretty pictures

      Functions which are important to the project.

      --
      "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    2. Re:This is all about the PR end of the system by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This has nothing to do with processing the data from the rover (which comes in at rates a dial-up modem could handle). It's about the web hosting system that lets casual visitors look at the pretty pictures.

      NASA could just upload the stills to Flickr and the videos to Youtube and save some money.

      That is not quite true. The images that are seen are actually a mosaic of many images. The individual images are served up as a composite on demand from the servers. It is unlikely that NASA would have the time and resources to convert all of them so they could be displayed on Flickr and Youtube.

  2. And a perfect example, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...of precisely where open-source should be applied; NASA. I like to imagine such endeavors are not self-serving, but public, and for anyone with the will and ability, to either contribute, admire, or simply understand.

  3. Late-Breaking News from the Council: INFILTRATION! by Tackhead · · Score: 3, Funny
    Ongoing intelligence reports from the blue world reveals that our programme of infiltration continues unnoticed.

    K'Breel, speaker for the Council, spake thus.

    "Integrating our semantic maps into the minds of the blueworlders has been a difficult task, but already their vocalization sequences have been reprogrammed to vocalize words unpronounceable in their language, but which are perfectly curlmenot in our fair tongue - words like like 'Nginx', 'Railocms', and 'Glusterfs.'"

    When an agile young developer, fresh from a tour of duty infiltrating the blueworlders' breeding factories, suggested that a traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility, K'Breel recognized that the threat was bidirectional. (To defend against the threat, the Speaker, being in a particularly mercurial framework of mind, had the developer 's nodes gimped: the silly git's gelsacs were thrown into a blender, and the extracted fluid was disposed of by means of a waterfall.)

  4. Coming soon to Slashdot . . . by greenreaper · · Score: 4, Funny

    "EFF files injunction against NASA for AGPL violations in Mars Rover firmware"

  5. Oh so that is why it's so cheap to do! by BetaDays · · Score: 2

    Oh so that is why it's so cheap to do!

    Actually I wish they got more funding so they could do a lot more.

    --
    Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
  6. AWS Seems like winner here by devforhire · · Score: 5, Insightful

    AWS seems like the real key to the success here, not the use of open source software. While I think it's great that NASA took the open source route, I've read nothing to defend the position that this would not have been successful with non-open source software:

    "A traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility."

    Even the article praises AWS more than the open source software mentioned, it's main source of content appears to come from the linked article with information about the open source pieces of the stack added.

  7. What is even more amazing... by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 2

    What is even more amazing that the Curiosity Rover is that somehow Microsoft wasn't selected for a government project.

  8. Railo -- not a CMS? by FairAndUnbalanced · · Score: 2

    I believe that Railo is a scripting language, not a CMS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railo

  9. Open Source and Mars Rover by dgharmon · · Score: 2

    "Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a free, open source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy .. Railo is an open source content management system (CMS) .. GlusterFS is an open source, distributed file system", link

    --
    AccountKiller