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Mars Polar Lander Lands Today
Quite a number of people have written, including the Webmaster of the Mars Polar Lander Site to let us know that it will be touching down at ~12:14 PST. The website will have also have a Downlink from the Lander itself which is incredibly cool. Check out their site - but also check out the technical document about the web site. Very interesting read for those of you who want to know about setting up a powerful web site. The web site is using a huge amount of Open Source software - Apache, Perl, PHP, Linux, MySQL and other software as well.
It's funny that there is a SPACESHIP landing on another planet millions of miles away with the potential to make interesting and possibly incredible scientific discoveries, and you guys (or a significant number of you) are interested in the server software running on the machine with pictures on the internet back on earth.
I'm not saying it's bad...but C'MON!!!
Images will make up a significant proportion of the data and during busy periods it is estimated that one 256 bit x 256 bit image could be received by UCLA every minute.
65.536 bits/minute -> 94.371.840 bits/day -> 82.575.360 bytes/week
In 4 Gbytes of RAM there are 4.294.967.296 bytes =~ 52 weeks of images (1 year)
Each of the origin servers uses dual Pentium II 450 CPUs. They are equipped with 512MB RAM and approximately 20GB of internal storage. An external RAID5 system provides an additional 50GB of storage.
That storage would be nice to store the Apache logs, but it seems unnecessary, the images aren't bulky (4 Gb/year). However, they would not keep a year of images in memory, for speed.
Exactly, what are we supposed to learn about this configuration? It doesn't make sense to me.
sure. but have you tried connecting to www-origin.marspolarlander.com lately?
Another mic question:
As I was waking up this morning, I *think* that my radio told me that the first sounds from the probe would be the voices of MS engineers -- they did a test (here on earth) and then didn't delete.
Anyone else hear this, or was I dreaming?
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
From the article:
| ``We put all the sequences together and
| basically we send the arm's sequence machine an
| e-mail with an attachment. So it gets the
| e-mail and it says, ``OK, I'll move over here
| and I'll dig a trench,'' Slostad said.
Didn't anyone tell NASA to never just blindly open an e-mail attachment? Next thing you know, the lander will be emailing one of the Voyager probles, instructing it to send the latest make.money.fast scheme to the first intelligent life it encounters.
This will be, of course, the REAL reason aliens attack, hell bent on destroying the Earth.
And all because some poor robotic arm on Mars opened an e-mail attachment. The lesson: DON'T DO IT!
;)
-- Rick
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+9:30? (I'm guessing.)
3:00pm ET. So much for that web server.
If it turns out that this mission's failure was due to its internal Windows CE operating system, it could be the finally nail on the coffin for Microsoft's attempt at getting people behind this OS.
I guess it couldn't handle it. At 2:09pm CST, it was hosed, can't connect, or get a recursive page that says "Document has moved here" with "here" being a link to itself.
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
You are right. However, they say that images would make up a significant proportion of the data, and lacking more information, that's what I could say.
Oh, never mind.
If the main site is /.ed, try http://www.marsportal.com. They (we) have images and several live cameras from inside mission control at UCLA.
(Disclaimer - Yes, I am indirectly related to this site.)
-shane
zulu time would seem to be the best option.... works for us aviators =p aux
but I smell some new desktop background images once this probe starts transmitting!
And I doubt that the images are 256x256x1 as per your calculations...x8, x16, anybody know?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Are our standards just a *bit* high? Space should be a now thing? Get a grip. Tons of people would be happy to tell you that science fiction is an important part of scientific advance, but it's still science fucking fiction. These people are limited by (gasp!) laws of physics and current-day propulsion techniques.
Ah
- c o w
-T
Q: If university graduates can't express themselves in their native tongue, what are the chances they can:
(a) tell the difference between units of measurement; or
(b) wire a plug without leaving conductors exposed; or
(c) operate a parachute by remote control?
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Dave Clark, IETF
Is today some holliday or something I didnt know about? I mean look at all the lamers posting today, shouldn't they be in school?
[Yes, I'm a cruel bastard...]
Nothing wrong with my connection. I can post on Slashdot (the definitive statement for being well-connected in this modern world) and can traceroute quite happily to the Mars Lander site. I suspect there's something unusual happening with the funky load balancing/Caching/DNS magic described in the technical document. I'm sure I won't be the only person experiencing problems reaching the site -- and yes, I did try several times. :-)
--
Paul Gillingwater
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
Yep. heard it on NPR. The mic is on a Russian science package and I guess after it was launched someone remembered that they didn't clear the memory chip for the mic so there is probly the voices of the guys doing a sound check.
For some reason I have an image of Tom Hanks dressed as an Aerosmith roadie doing mic checks on SNL's Wayne's World.
that was not funny
hehe j/k.. it gave me a giggle =)
(Score:-1, Redundant)
Were his last words after doing this "I put my faith in God"?
(That's an EgyptAir reference...)
>I know my GMT offset, even though I don't live in Europe.
Yes but most people who dont live in the great USofA dont give a shit what LA's GMT offset is. Do you know what the GMT offset of Adelaide (hint Australia) is ?
I come from EST and didn't know for sure what PST's offset is, I mean I don't keep track of all the time zones in the world. I mean any one outside EST has a legitimate reason to not know it. I think it is a valid to request (my request) that times be posted in GMT since that actually means something to most of the world. Contrary to popular belief North America is the centre of the universe and people are allowed to not know details about it.
the probe didn't crash along with the servers.
They've been hosed since about 1.30 CST.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
If I were an shy ET type, this would be the perfect opportunity to make yourself known to the world in a non-threatening sort of way.
The first image comes down and it's... it's.... OH MY GOD! It's Ray Walston!
(for those of you that don't know.. this was the guy in My Favorite Martian)
Fish! LipHo
broadcast.com was supposed to offer a 300K Windows Media Player stream. They can't even keep their 28.8 streams running at full speed. They stopped working for me at 11AM PST...
Hmm, no contact at first attempt. 10 minutes past. Hopefully something just went into safemode.
It ruins my day.
Regards,
January
As of this writing, the first signals from the Martian Lander were supposed to have been received about 35 minutes ago. So far they have been unable to detect any. JPL is saying that there is no reason for extreme pessimism just yet. There are a number of possibilities as to the cause, and some of them are correctable.
And the brethren went away edified.
that's all
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
NASA Waits for Signal from Mars (16:20 EST)
Mars Polar Lander Official Website
--The more you know, the less you know.
What does your link have to do with AT&T?
this coming sometime after.. those reports of one of the last missions crashing b/c of conversion problems between American & metric
Insert mind here.
You can also watch a NASA tv feed at broadcast.com. The have a 300k stream, which is cool. (MediaPlayer format, though)
Here's the broadcast.com link: http://www.broadcast.com/events/n asa/marslanding/
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
i think it starts at 3:30pm, and first picture will come at 4pm, on Discovery Channel
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Why is this post moderated to 0?
It can be very annoying to readers in outside the US that times are noted in PST, EST, CST and I don't know what. Why use all those standards (which are in fact local standards to you guys in America) on a global medium like the internet?
Does anyone know what time this is for other parts of the world? I am sure people would find this useful! Someone must be running a world time clock on their desktop who can quickly post times around the world that correlate to 12.00 PST?
the last failed mission was not a problem with conversions. the martians are just tired of our noisy little probes. we had to send this one all the way to the south pole so they would leave us alone.
the metric system is another conspiracy entirely...
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Given the nature of the mission, would this be the Day the Cherry gets Popped?
I have my default colors set to white/black, so when a site like that specifies a white background I "see" white text on a white background.
It's really a simple thing here folks, TEXT="BLACK", how hard is that.
The setup is _sweet_...however, I'm wondering how many people caught the os (Solaris x86) that they were using. As beautiful/wonderful/powerful as Linux/(Free||Open||Net)BSD are, and even in the presence of such popular and generally spiffy open source software, solaris is still rock solid. i disliked alot of things about solaris on x86 (in comparison to the sparc version), but stability was never one of them....and i'm surprised not to see more similar setups like this (commercial OS + tons of open source software==very nice).
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
At least in my part of the US, which may explain that peculiar tic some people have around here. :)
;)
This could be a Big Day, as long as we don't puncture the Red Planet's fragile membrane and cause it to deflate.
They're actually using Solaris x86 which I've heard isn't as stable as Solaris SPARC.
Excellent setup, but I'd like to know if there's a way to make my Apache send a cached php page depending on cookie data.
see http://www.dis covery.com/indep/newsfeatures/marspolar/marspolar. html for more.
The big question: will anybody have better coverage?
expect. Mars isn't really devoid of life..
A live downlink, eh? Just add an uplink, next time, and patch in Luner Lander...
Whatever the guys at NASA do, =DON'T SNEEZE!= At least, not until the probe lands. Nobody really believes in that metric/imperial problem, with the last probe. We all know it's cos there was a flour fight in the control room, and nobody could tell which switch was which.
The webmaster of NASA -told- Slashdot about this? I hope, for their sakes, they've laid in some extra lines of that 2 terabit fibre...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
We keep sending them up, and they keep shooting them down...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Guess which wrote this...
Forget the fact that this mission is going to land on the freaking polar icecaps of Mars to look for water (as opposed to CO2/Dry Ice). And who cares about the meteorlogical research. But they use OSS!!!!! Oh my god, please let us know about that!
/. article mentions that they use many OSS technologies, such as Linux. I didn't see Linux mentioned *ANYWHERE* in that document....
Funny, this
-T
I only have read (so far) the first part of the technical document on how the web site works, but if I understand what I just read, it looks like their acceleration scheme would fall apart if everyone started trying to access www-origin.marspolarlander.com. Did I miss something?
More than 3 billion Web hits per day and 300 million page requests per day against up to 2 terabytes of data" and wasn't even using the W2K Advanced Datacenter Server.
That is a very large assumption considering we have no idea what the load is or where the bottleneck is. Given the experience of the Pathfinder (which crushed all previous load records two years ago) this could be in fact exceeding the 300 million page load/day rate, and with a much higher image load than shown in the Unisys demo.
You can have a datacenter with 100 trillion page load per day capacity be useless if your backbone provider can't handle the load. As the Chicago Mercantile Exchange found out.
By the way, did you ask youself exactly WHY the Advanced Datacenter Server wasn't used by Unisys? Or why they needed over 100 CPUs for this 'proof of concept'? What the hell is the manageability of that many servers, anyway?
I am so glad we have the Internet. If I had to rely on the "correspondent" who's job it is to filter "technical" content from the guests by interrupting them in mid-sentence for information, I'd be practically ignorant about the space program.
They always interrupt the same way, too:
Guest: "You see, if the antenna is aligned at more than 10 degrees, then the transmission frequency might..."
Correspondent: "Uh, Uh, Uh, Uh, Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I think, um, I think I want to ask a question of our other guest, here, uhhhh, why don't we just land on Venus instead?"
...and then everyone at the network breathes a sigh of relief as the informationless noise resumes, for about 10 seconds, then they go to commercial.
By the way, the Venus question is based on a real question heard just today on a "popular" network. "Why don't we just colonize Venus?" "Well, Bob, forgetting that the temperature is about 800 degrees, the wind is blowing at 200mph, and the atmosphere is poisonous, I really can't say."
Oh, and the "correspondent" got the coordinates of the landing site backwards, placing the lander at the Martian north pole instead of south. Then he made the priceless statement: "Well, those numbers probably don't mean much to you..."
Actually, they don't because they're INACCURATE TO BEGIN WITH!!!! Of course, how could we expect our "viewers" to understand basic geography? Note to "popular" network: not only do we understand basic geography, but we also know how to read. If your "correspondents" can't even READ the copy they are given, how are they supposed to REPORT the news???
It's just another example of the "how long can the 'correspondent' talk journalism" being blathered all over the place. Journalism used to be about intelligently reporting the facts, not listening to the "correspondent" talk and talk and talk while their guests sit there quietly after being interrupted in mid-sentence for the fourth time.
I am REALLY glad I can just go to the Polar Lander site and read the information in as much technical detail as I want without the "popular network of the day" filtering out all the stuff they don't think I'll understand for me.
Sorry. I just get a little frustrated sometimes.modprobe mars
That storage would be nice to store the Apache logs, but it seems unnecessary, the images aren't bulky (4 Gb/year). However, they would not keep a year of images in memory, for speed. Sound from the mic, the instrument pack data sets, etc...forgot those I guess???
What happened to the days when NASA took us to the moon. Nothing as great has happened in my life time as a result of NASA.
Perhaps the bureacracy (sp?) that is NASA has grown to impede its own growth. In its younger years it seems to have accomplished tasks well beyond that which it is capable of today.
So my question is, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?
America seems motivated, and wanting to go forward. But NASA seems to want to give us a lack luster performance.
Something needs to be done... Perhaps a NASA2 to inspire competition between the two, with congress appropriately funding the one making the most progress.
I'm tired of waiting... Space should be a now thing... and was promised to us when we were kids... the now shouldn't be tomorrow...
err,
and stuff.
It wasn't moderated to 0. Anonymous Coward posts always start at 0.
Is this SOOOO hard?
I know my GMT offset, even though I don't live in Europe.
Eastern = GMT -0500
Central = GMT -0600
Mountain = GMT -0700
Pacific = GMT -0800
Eastern and Pacific are the only ones you need to remember. -0500, and -0500 - 0300 = -0800. Just remember Eastern, and remember that Pacific is three zones west.
Everyone should know both their offset from GMT and from EST. Otherwise they're going to have trouble.
Is it THAT complicated? I guess to people who use "meter" as a base for every fucking unit of measurement they have, having to actually remember TWO numbers can be a pain.
A message from Naked and Petrified Guy, to cow.
COW, CUT IT THE FUCK OUT.
When you troll, troll in moderation, and know when to stop. Otherwise you'll ruin it for everyone. Just like we Segfault crowd ruined it at Segfault.
If you're trolling just to amuse yourself rather than to amuse others, you're just ruining it for everyone. You've got to be DISCRETE and NO OVERDUE IT. Watch people's responses. When they ALL become negative, stop. When you've still got some fans, then fine, go ahead.
But please don't ruin it for the rest of us trolls and for the rest of Slashdot but posting so much garbage that you actually make stories UNREADABLE, or so much that Slashdot HAS to take action.
DON'T MESS UP A GOOD THING.
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.marspolarlander.com/
The following error was encountered:
The system returned: (79) Connection refused
This means that: The remote site or server may be down. Please try again soon.
Generated by squid/1.1.9@cache.iaea.org
--
Paul Gillingwater
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
Hmm ok.
But now my question is:
Why are they at 0 and not -1?
- c o w
They are probably using f5's bigip load balancer, which runs on BSD/OS and makes www.marspolarlander.com show up as a BSD/OS box. The actual boxes serving the content would be something behind that.
Well, in this case the boxes behind it are netapp boxes ("netcache" is their product name) acting as accelerators. The idea here is that if most of their content is static (and it looks like it is), then the accelerators can serve the vast majority of the hits.
You don't need a whole lot of disk IO, and lots of architectures can easily run out of network bandwidth or memory before having any problems with bus bandwidth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This got me to thinking. The photos aren't great, they are good but they aren't awesome. Regardless of our record, I think the landing process is error prone. The landers don't last too long. The focus of their coverage is also extremely limited, Likewise, we can do insane stuff with spy satallites, like seeing through water and dirt like they did with the Nile river. Anyone want to start a petition to get an older spy sat donated to NASA? a 15 year old sat. should be far better than what they are landing, not terribly useful to the NRO anymore and putting it into place should be relatively cheap and assuming that they use metric units it should be a piece of cake. Then we could have high resolution photos from all sorts of places on Mars and with ground penetrating radar and photography we could look deeper than the current lander is going to look. Plus it would last for years and we could examine thousands of Martian locations we wouldn't get to examine the Martian dirt but I would think that our results would be just as good if not better. Plus they'd end up declassifying some more infor on what our spy sats can do...
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
Long comments get a permanent +1, to those who have long comment bonus turned on (which is default).
Came across this at Yahoo. I can't WAIT for AT&T's explanation on this one.
.pjd
Duh! Hello, are you really that dumb? You really didn't know that Pacific time is 3 hours off from Eastern time? Most people in the US learn that in grade school since you say you're in EST what's your excuse?
http://www.unisys.co m/events/comdex99/presentations/uis-ms.asp
Their Windows2000 setup handled "More than 3 billion Web hits per day and 300 million page requests per day against up to 2 terabytes of data" and wasn't even using the W2K Advanced Datacenter Server.
Kudos to their webmaster for taking the trouble to write his configuration down. It's great that someone is prepared to share his experience with the world in this way.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
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I really want something to aim for!
I'm worried about how much NASA is hyping this up (and they are hyping it!). Sure, if it goes well, it's great PR. But if something happens to it -- especially after losing the last satellite -- it's gonna be hard for NASA to maintain support. I guess maybe that's what scares me the most.
Powers&8^]
Powers&8^]