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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.
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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3:00pm ET. So much for that web server.
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
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.
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
It ruins my day.
Regards,
January
They're going to try again a little before
5PM EST (2200UTC). They say they think it
went into safe mode upon landing, or that
the antenna wasn't pointed in quite the right
direction.
main(O){10<putchar((O--,102-((O&4)*16| (31&60>>5*(O&3)))))&&main(2+ O);}
LN2 is cool!
that's all
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
It's actually more properly "the news is less than perfect". I mean, you're landing this little thing on another planet. The chances of everything working exactly like planned the first time around is pretty small. It'll work. Trust me >:D
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
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
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?
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)
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?
We keep sending probes, and the Martians keep shooting them down ...
See ... their SDI system works ...
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...
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?
Here's a web site that does time conversions:
http://www.timeanddate.com/wor ldclock/fixedform.html
Here is a link to times around the world at noon today, PST
joe
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Is this SOOOO hard?
I know my GMT offset, even though I don't live in Europe.
That's because GMT is the standard. I know my GMT offset too. Maybe, therefore, it would be a good idea just to give the time in GMT? It's not trying to remember two numbers that's the pain, it's idiocy like expecting the whole world to memorise the name of each and every time zone, just in case something happens there.
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
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..
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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