All the scientists here at JPL are very happy to see that we'll be getting more science, however one of the issues is that we're going to be moving to a less efficient planning cycle, planning for two days per rover at a time. Also it will all be being done on earth time, which is nice for scientists, however it means things have to be planned very far in advance.
Also one of the problems we are experiencing is that a lot of the mission software was originally designed to only run at JPL on our computing environment, and is very difficult to take back to home institutions because it is so specialized.
I'm currently working on making the Science Activity Planner (the tool used by all scientists to do high level planning before they start sequencing) work collaboratively over the web. It's exciting because we're dramatically increasing the amount of people who can participate in high level planning. You can grab the public version, called Maestro, here.
One of the other challenges is the bandwidth and latency associated with transfering autogenerated data products (imagery etc) to all of our satalite institutions. I'm currently working on ways to reduce the necessary bandwidth but without lossy compression there's only so much one can do.
Anyways, this part of the mission will test out a paradigm known as "Distributed Mission Operations". You can download a paper written by my supervisor about how this was used on Pathfinder here.
Future mars missions will last far too long to bring scientists away from their home institutions and pay for temporary housing etc (which is a significant cost). Scientists want to be with their collegues and families during the long periods of exploration.
Hopefully this will prove that it is both feasible and desireable. There are several studies going on about this, but I'm not aware of any relevant links.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Your sig should say "Karma: Insanely Great, because I work at NASA and deserve it."
Ha, well it's true that NASA has definitely increased my Karma quite a bit (see this post) working there is quite reward enough. It's a privilege to be paid by the taxpayers to help understand the universe better (especially our little corner!)
Stuff like what you guys do is why every kid wants to be an astronaut until the school system beats all their creativity, curiosity and ambition out of them.
Yes, it would be nice if there was some way to preserve creativity better in the school system. Maybe more emphasis on problem solving and concepts and less on memorization (okay spelling is important but that's about it).
One of NASA's main objectives is to inspire people into the field of science/engineering, and I think that that alone is worth every dollar spent.
Can I ask what you did, what your major was, etc. before you got to work on this project?
Well basically I just went in and interviewed to work for Professor Squyres as a freshman in 2000, my very first week of school at Cornell University. After that I landed internships at JPL every summer working on related software. I picked up the skills I needed on the way, however I had been programming since 3rd grade. The design aspects were actually much more difficult than the programming. I'm now one semester away from my bachelors
degree in Applied Physics w/ minor in Computer Science.
I really, really want to work in space operations and my original plan was to join the Navy, log some military high-performance jet flight time, then either get out and go to grad school or go to Naval War College for engineering.
Unfortunately, the Navy idea has since been nixed and now I'm sort of floating around and not knowing what my next step should be.
Well, I know software engineers at JPL that didn't even major in computer science. They key is too get a degree, some 'leet skills, and then interview. It's almost impossible to get fired from somewhere like JPL (my boss says "You don't just have to be criminally incompetant, you have to actually be a criminal") which means that they are very selective about who they hire. If you're serious about it, the best thing you can do is get a hardcore education (masters degree from prestigeous university helps) and then interview. The pay isn't great but the perks (working with badass equipment, exploring the universe, etc) more than outweigh that:)
I would just take the GRE and apply to grad schools (probably for Comp. E. or maybe AE), but I'm afraid that might be a little too directionless. Are there research assistantships available anywhere you know of that are looking for people and are willing to pay your way (or at least most of your way) through grad school? Basically I'd like to hear what path you took and what you think would be a good way to get started.
Direction is something that has to come from inside you, not from a structured program. There's absolutely nothing wrong with going for a graduate degree before deciding where you want to go with your career. I'd actually suggest it because it's harder to get back into school after you leave. I do know a lot of companies pay for their employees to earn their masters degrees though. My friend at RSA Security is doing this.
In short I don't know what you should do. I'd suggest reading the NASA center websites, looking at what criteria they are specifically looking for, and calling the HR department. I know there are people who are "Accademic Part Time" at JPL and study while working (some at the undergrad level!) You might look into that.
As long as you feel you have what it takes, you just need to talk to the right people and find out what to do. I'm still working on my career (eventually I'll have a PhD in physics and do computational physics of some kind).
Actually this is just a game to set the right expectations. They designed whole thing with a much larger project life right from the beginning.
This is utterly untrue. I have been working on the project since 2000 and allow me to explain where the 90 days figure came from.
It's rather complicated, however it boils down to how many solar panels they could bring, and how fast reduces the effectiveness of the panels. They tried everything they could think of in the lab to figure out some way to remove the dust from the panels however that proved to be something they could not solve, so they took data from the mars pathfinder mission, and came up with a number describing the conservative estimate for the lifetime of the solar panels given the dust on Mars (and remember, Mars has a lot of dust).
I've talked to mission physicist Geoffry Landis about this extensively and I have seen the data, which basically indicates that the rate of power dropping is about half of what we expected. This is very good news! This means we have a good shot at a very long extended mission, because if it continues at this rate, eventually the solar days on mars will increase in length faster than the dust buildup occludes power collection. It is believed therefore that the solar panels will not, as expected, be the final limiting factor on the length of the mission.
However, because that number was basically 90 days, every other instrument on the craft was designed to last at least 90 days, but not necessarily any longer. There are many motors that have a very short lifespan, which could now very easily fail at any time now. This includes a Rock Abrasion Tool motor, along with the azithmuthal actuator for the Pancam Mast Assembly. Also the wheel motors are put under a lot of stress and so they are good candidates for failure. Also, a single thermal failure in the middle of the night can destroy the Mini-Thermal Emission spectrometer, and the other spectrometers are not very useful if the Instrument Deployment Device fails either.
NASA played the same "stay on the safe side" tune on many otehr missions - see for example the Voyager missions, etc.
It is true that NASA made conservative estimates for things, which is proper engineering practice in situations that are as unknown and dangerous as this. I do not believe NASA was covering their own butts so much as trying to figure out how to use the 90 days they thought there were mostly guaranteed as best as they could, and then deal with more as they came.
Disclaimer: I am "just an intern" but I've been on this project for almost 4 years and what's stated above came from actual mission scientists and engineers and is not just speculation.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
My whole kid's class is using Maestro to view the Mars photos in a similiar fashion to the NASA engineers.
Wow, really glad to hear that! I'm one of the Maestro developers and I am very proud to see it being used in educational settings. Don't forget that you can also build mockup activity plans in the very same way that the scientists do! It's more than just an image browser:)
Great science... and great learning as well. It's java driven... and crunches older computers. However, it really shows the excellent work that we are doing there.
Sorry about the speed, the main problem is that in order to handle certain real-time image processing (band arithmetic, mosaic warping, image rescaling, anaglyphs) etc, we had to use an architecture that burns significant RAM. The data sets are huge and you wouldn't believe what's going on behind the scenes. Also I believe that on the network at JPL most operations are IO bound so making the code faster would not speed the application for the scientists.
Much of this is because we weren't able to spend much time on the public version of our tool due to funding reasons. If you like this kind of software and want to see more of it, write to NASA and ask that they fund it. It's part of NASA's mission, to inspire the next generation to explore and to take part in science and engineering.
If you email maestro@telascience.org today I'll get you more info on how to do this.
Glad to see you're enjoying the software, and I hope your kid's class now has a better understanding of what it's like to explore mars.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Maestro/Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Are the makers of porn dialers, trojans, email relays and viruses going to put a helpful icon on their software? No.
I don't think this legislation is going after criminals, per se, but software like Gator and the like that are "legitimate" businesses with sleasy tactics. By making such underhanded tactics illegal, it will severely limit how much money etc can be collected by such a scheme.
That is contrary to the nature of the software, which is to hide, report on your actions, enable remote operations, reproduce and the like.
Yes, and any corporation that wants to stay in business will comply with this law, reducing the effectiveness of such programs, and discouraging it.
Spammers are going to ignore this, just like an unsubscribe link.
Eh, spammers aren't the worst problem with this kind of software. Gator etc. are, as their software looks genuinely useful to the average user.
As an interning developer working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, I believe that Sun developing a linux-based strategy will be a great thing.
We use many Sun boxen, along with various flavors of Linux, and it would be tremendous to see more integration. Their work on linux-based Java has already been an enabling factor in our work and I believe that Sun has many good ideas (and good engineers working hard on it).
This annoucement gives me hope that we can continue in our relationship with Sun for future missions, while taking advantage of many of the best features of Linux.
To be fair I should mention we also use Windows and OS X to great effect as well, however good news for Sun is good news for us, especially considering the tremendous quantities of legacy software we have for Solaris!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Wow, that's one of the best slashdot posts I've ever read! I'm tired of religion bashing on/. (I mean, obviously it's their right to do so, it's the moderators I'm more upset with). Atheistic humanism is as much of a religion as anything else, and to be honest I think the most logical (although boring) choice is to be agnostic.
I'm a Christian and I study physics, and people so often ask me how I can be a Christian and believe so much in Science... I think for some people science has become the new religion - it gives us all the answers, except to the most important questions (why are we here? what is right/wrong?). I work on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission and I was upset to see so many posts on slashdot saying that finding life on another planet would mean the end of religion... I don't get this! Many people working on the mission are Christians (or also some other faiths) and they are all very excited by the prospect, as am I! People assume too much about things they do not understand.
Thanks again for a great post!
Cheers,
Justin
Re:Plotting Ahead?
on
Unruly Milky Way
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Stars are so small and so far apart that they almost never come close to hitting. Main sequence stars are roughly separated by one parsec (3.26 light-years). You can think of it like having one golf ball ten miles away from you and hitting another and asking if they are likely to collide. Galaxies do collide often and interact because they are close together compared to their width.
Very true! Two things though:
Plotting ahead is useful because even though stars don't collide, they do come close enough to each other to disrupt planetary systems. Even just preturbing the Oort cloud a bit would cause destructive impacts on earth that could wipe out all life.
Second of all, galaxies "collide" however it's kinda like two clouds of smoke "colliding" because there's really not much actual physical contact (although black holes might eat quite a bit during this period).
Good to point this out though! Galactic dynamics is quite fascinating, and much more complex than you'd expect!
7200 Watts! Holy hairdryers batman! With power consumptions like this, your athelon wouldn't be the only thing that's ON FIRE in your laptop!
You assume that all of the power used to charge the battery is dissipated as heat. If that were the case, rechargable batteries would be useless since that would mean the battery didn't store any of the energy you put into it. I think I agree that your qualitative conclusion, though; a 90% efficient rechargable battery would dissipate 720 watts of heat, which is still quite a bit of thermal energy.
Just for the record, I was going for a +5 funny. Not sure I'll make it though.
I never actually made reference to how much of the heat would be dissapated, however even 5% would be a rediculous amount of heat. If I'd have had the actual numbers I could have done thorough analysis... stupid reporters!
Why is it that I'm not holding my breath to have this technology in a laptop?
Hmm... Lets look at the numbers here... I'll use the numbers for my trusty 17" powerbook.
The power supply for charging the battery puts out about 60 Watts of power. The article mentions that instead of taking an hour to charge, these batteries only take half a minute. That's 120 times the power, which means the total power used by a charger for my laptop using these batteries would be...
7200 Watts! Holy hairdryers batman! With power consumptions like this, your athelon wouldn't be the only thing that's ON FIRE in your laptop!
this is "self modifying hardware", similar to "self modifying code". but is it fair to call it chaotic? In a chaotic system, the process remains the same but the output varies.
Uh, that's not true at all.
blockquoth the article:
Chaos, in the mathematical sense, is not unpredictability: chaotic systems can behave in a predictable and reproducible way. The catch is that the evolution of a chaotic system depends very sensitively on its starting conditions, which leads in the long term to behaviour that is ultimately unpredictable
Did you even read it?
State of the system is essentially kept by the chaotic strange attractors, and state change is accomplish through a conrolled divergence. Check out some books on chaos theory, or some tutorials on sites like this.
Wow, nice to see an anon-post that's insightful for once!
Bold is me, italics is parent.
LATOR is capable of testing string theory, an exciting but so far merely theoretical development in high energy physics.
Or rather, it might conceivably be capable of testing some rather speculative models within string theory; there are plenty of other string theory models that LATOR can't test, and no good reason to believe in one over the other. That's one of the problems with string theory: it's too flexible. People can cook up all sorts of artificial string models, but that doesn't mean that any of those models are likely to be true, even if string theory itself is true.
It will test some of the most reasonable/popular models, which is a big step up from having never been tested at all.
LATOR also seems to be much more accurate,
It is, but it's also a test of something that we've already measured extensively (albeit much more sensitively). Our existing measurements of frame-dragging are extremely crude.
Quoting this page:
Abstract: LATOR is a space-based experiment to accurately measure
the gravitational deflectional deflection of light. The
experiment uses two laser bearing spacecraft at the
opposite side of the Sun and a very long baseline
heterodyne interferometer to measure the angle at an
accuracy of 0.2 uas. Combining this measurement with
laser ranging from Earth to both spacecraft,
gravitational deflection can be made with an accuracy
5000 times better than previously done and will allow
measurements of the second order and frame dragging
effects. !10
As you can see, you were mistaken.
and less likely to receive interference.
Why? And, so what? (Unless you're suggesting that GPB will receive so much interference that it won't work.)
All it takes is a little bit of interference and the whole thing doesn't work at all, it's so darn sensitive. LATOR is less mechnically intensive.
I do hope that this experiment works out, however as other posters have mentioned, there only has to be one unexpected source of error to totally screw this up.
The same is true of LATOR or of any other experiment, especially highly sensitive ones.
LATOR's architecture is much different, and I believe by using a long baseline etc, it makes it difficult for interference at one end to screw up the entire experiment. Also remember that it's something that's fairly time invarient, whereas precession is not. The architecture of LATOR seems more likely to deal with sources of interference than something that's based primarily on mechnical components.
But I haven't done the actual math for either, so what do I know?:)
Very cool experiment (well worth the cash) however I think the LATOR relativity experiment would be much more interesting and scientifically useful.
And probably not much more expensive.
LATOR is capable of testing string theory, an exciting but so far merely theoretical development in high energy physics. LATOR also seems to be much more accurate, and less likely to receive interference.
I do hope that this experiment works out, however as other posters have mentioned, there only has to be one unexpected source of error to totally screw this up.
Actually, the Powermac G5s all come with SATA drives. It's not even an option, it's the base config. I'd be surprised if Dell didn't offer it too (can't be bothered to check their online store, hate the site).
>>Isn't it about time we ditched floppy disks for something better? >CD-RW Yeah, no one uses floppies for small files. Or bigger ones. Many people I know, including my family, don't have CD-RW or even CD-R.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched IDE drives for something better? >SATA And where is this option on dell.com/apple.com etc? Can you buy this at walmart? That stuff is nice for high end servers but...
>>Isn't it about time we ditched x86 for something better? >AMD So we went from x86 to... x86. Wow. And not to mention that AMD's doing everything they can to drag out x86 to 64 bits.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched Microsoft Windows for something better? >Linux Right, with it's 10% market share or whatever on desktops, I wouldn't exactly call it "ditching."
>>Isn't it about time we ditched CDs for something better? >DVDs No one listens to music on DVDs, and I'd like to ask you how much of your software comes on a single DVD instead of multiple CDs.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched telnet for something better? >SSH This is about the only accurate thing in your entire post.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched CRTs for something better? >LCDs Better??? The only thing better is their size and energy consumption. image quality is significantly worse, to the point that for hardcore photographic work they are simply unacceptable due to inability to be calibrated properly. They aren't as bright, and have a really annoying image persistence which is bad for gaming, movies etc. Not to mention how expensive they are, and how easily they break.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched 20-year-old TV sets for something better? >New TVs, available at your local stores. Unless your area is fully up to spec, getting an HDTV doesn't do a lot of good. And the other TVs are the same old crap we've had for 20 years, but with different shaped remotes.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched COBOL for something better? >Visual Basic. Eh... Visual Basic is similar I suppose but I'm not sure it's really aimed at the exact same niche.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched BASIC for something better? >Uhm... it's for beginners. We can't ditch the biginners... Yes but introducing more graphical or process oriented programming, maybe even programming without side effects might be better tahn just giving them a language with all they syntax benefits of FORTRAN and not even half as powerful as ancient hypercard!
Come to think of it, hypertalk is a much better beginner's language.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched SCO Unix for something better? >Linux... we think. I don't know what the original poster had in mind about this. No comment.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched DOS for something better? >Windows XP And what exactly is the market share of XP among windows users? There's still people using 98 out there!
>>Isn't it about time we ditched Dubya for something better? >John Kerry Not only is the election over a half year off, but it remains to be seen that he could even do a better job. I mean, Dubya may not be the brightest guy (or even trustworthy) however he's at least predictable, whereas John Kerry has basiccally voted on both sides of every issue... does that guy stand for anything???
I personally think Venus is a much more interesting planet than mars. It would be cool for mars to attempt a venus rover despite the obvious challenges.
Mars has so far demonstrated an excellent proficiency for destroying planetary space probes, however historically it has not been known to build them.
Perhaps when it finds out Venus is a chick?
Cheers,
Justin
Re:Let's have a little poll.
on
Testing Relativity
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well i had a discussion with Dr. David Lee, a nobel laurate at Cornell University, and he's pretty much convinced that String Theory will be born out.
So that's my vote:-D
Although it'd be a little weird having to deal with all those extra dimensions all the time.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
P.S. As a JPLer, it's great to see JPL doing something hard-science related.
Undergraduates in U.S. universities are starting to abandon their studies in computer technology and engineering...
Enrollment in those fields has dropped by 19% in the past year alone.
The ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) is very concerned about the disruption of various portions of the RF spectrum, particularly HF that police, er, fema, etc. use.
I think you are confused. The ARRL is worried about sending modulated RF signals carrying broadband, not about fault tolerant power systems!
At first I thought the title read Rexx is Still Wrong After 25 Years.
I was like, "Damn straight!"
Cheers,
Justin
Re:I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this
on
Rent A Bit Of Weta Digital
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Check out http://www.worley.com/fprime.html
My part-time employer (when I'm not working for NASA/JPL) Maas Digital just bought a copy of the software... it utilizes stochastic methods to allow flexible real-time raytrace rendering (with good motion blur!)
It turns out that motion blur in 3D graphics is a very hard problem because it's essentially a high-dimensional integral, and it turns out the best method of doing generalized high-dimensional numerical integration is a stochastic algorithm (monte carlo method) so it's not surprising to me that it's a great way to do motion blurs.
My favorite aspect of stochastic methods is their ability to be continuously refined (for instance, in a video game, the longer you spent looking at an object, the better it would get etc, and the graphics performance would degrade very smoothly with changes in system load etc). It is also ideal for parallel processing, as it can be dynamically parallelized to completely heterogeneous computing nodes.
Dan and I agree that there's going to be a lot of stochastic algorithms in the future of computer graphics (though he is hopeful that analytical methods will eventually make a comeback, as they have better asymptotic performance).
200 Million dollars is a lot of money to put towards something that can probably never be used with any other piece of equipment except Hubble, and not put it to use.
This is actually a logical falacy. I learned about this in a decision theory class I was in for a while at Cornell University. Previous investments should not directly affect economic decisions like this, only the current situation. That is, just because we spent lots of $$$ to make Plan A work does not mean we should continue with Plan A even if Plan B does the same thing for less additional money.
Imagine that you buy a truck for $10000. You then end up putting several more thousand dollars into it for repairs (like we did with the hubble). You even got a nice big turbocharger to put on it for when it's fixed next... however you get a bill saying it'll cost $4000 to fix the truck. And it's getting old. And lets say truck technology has advanced so much that for $4000 you can get a nice brand new truck that's even better. Rational decision-making dictates you would purchase the new truck - despite how much money you put into it in the past.
I'm not suggesting that we currently have an alternative to Hubble that does the same thing for a better price, however previous investments SHOULD NOT dictate our policies, only the current scientific/economic facts.
Disclaimer: I work for NASA/JPL, but as a software engineer.
IIRC Osaki said there were some data structures he did not know how to implement in a pure functional language, but I don't think he said which. Are there any obvious gaps in the TOC given by the parent?
Splay Trees weren't mentioned in the TOC but I haven't gotten thruogh the whole book yet...
He does say that persistent arrays were about impossible to implement functionally except with a horrible access time. Random Access Lists are used instead (forgot to include that in my list).
Not sure what else is missing... I didn't see skiplists anywhere in there or any other randomized data structures, but that might have been a matter of personal taste on his part. He also didn't talk much about perfectly-balanced search trees (expensive in imperitive langauges, rediculously so in functional languages).
Slashdot Mirror
All the scientists here at JPL are very happy to see that we'll be getting more science, however one of the issues is that we're going to be moving to a less efficient planning cycle, planning for two days per rover at a time. Also it will all be being done on earth time, which is nice for scientists, however it means things have to be planned very far in advance.
Also one of the problems we are experiencing is that a lot of the mission software was originally designed to only run at JPL on our computing environment, and is very difficult to take back to home institutions because it is so specialized.
I'm currently working on making the Science Activity Planner (the tool used by all scientists to do high level planning before they start sequencing) work collaboratively over the web. It's exciting because we're dramatically increasing the amount of people who can participate in high level planning. You can grab the public version, called Maestro, here.
One of the other challenges is the bandwidth and latency associated with transfering autogenerated data products (imagery etc) to all of our satalite institutions. I'm currently working on ways to reduce the necessary bandwidth but without lossy compression there's only so much one can do.
Anyways, this part of the mission will test out a paradigm known as "Distributed Mission Operations". You can download a paper written by my supervisor about how this was used on Pathfinder here.
Future mars missions will last far too long to bring scientists away from their home institutions and pay for temporary housing etc (which is a significant cost). Scientists want to be with their collegues and families during the long periods of exploration.
Hopefully this will prove that it is both feasible and desireable. There are several studies going on about this, but I'm not aware of any relevant links.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Your sig should say "Karma: Insanely Great, because I work at NASA and deserve it."
Ha, well it's true that NASA has definitely increased my Karma quite a bit (see this post) working there is quite reward enough. It's a privilege to be paid by the taxpayers to help understand the universe better (especially our little corner!)
Stuff like what you guys do is why every kid wants to be an astronaut until the school system beats all their creativity, curiosity and ambition out of them.
Yes, it would be nice if there was some way to preserve creativity better in the school system. Maybe more emphasis on problem solving and concepts and less on memorization (okay spelling is important but that's about it).
One of NASA's main objectives is to inspire people into the field of science/engineering, and I think that that alone is worth every dollar spent.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Can I ask what you did, what your major was, etc. before you got to work on this project?
:)
Well basically I just went in and interviewed to work for Professor Squyres as a freshman in 2000, my very first week of school at Cornell University. After that I landed internships at JPL every summer working on related software. I picked up the skills I needed on the way, however I had been programming since 3rd grade. The design aspects were actually much more difficult than the programming. I'm now one semester away from my bachelors degree in Applied Physics w/ minor in Computer Science.
I really, really want to work in space operations and my original plan was to join the Navy, log some military high-performance jet flight time, then either get out and go to grad school or go to Naval War College for engineering. Unfortunately, the Navy idea has since been nixed and now I'm sort of floating around and not knowing what my next step should be.
Well, I know software engineers at JPL that didn't even major in computer science. They key is too get a degree, some 'leet skills, and then interview. It's almost impossible to get fired from somewhere like JPL (my boss says "You don't just have to be criminally incompetant, you have to actually be a criminal") which means that they are very selective about who they hire. If you're serious about it, the best thing you can do is get a hardcore education (masters degree from prestigeous university helps) and then interview. The pay isn't great but the perks (working with badass equipment, exploring the universe, etc) more than outweigh that
I would just take the GRE and apply to grad schools (probably for Comp. E. or maybe AE), but I'm afraid that might be a little too directionless. Are there research assistantships available anywhere you know of that are looking for people and are willing to pay your way (or at least most of your way) through grad school? Basically I'd like to hear what path you took and what you think would be a good way to get started.
Direction is something that has to come from inside you, not from a structured program. There's absolutely nothing wrong with going for a graduate degree before deciding where you want to go with your career. I'd actually suggest it because it's harder to get back into school after you leave. I do know a lot of companies pay for their employees to earn their masters degrees though. My friend at RSA Security is doing this.
In short I don't know what you should do. I'd suggest reading the NASA center websites, looking at what criteria they are specifically looking for, and calling the HR department. I know there are people who are "Accademic Part Time" at JPL and study while working (some at the undergrad level!) You might look into that.
As long as you feel you have what it takes, you just need to talk to the right people and find out what to do. I'm still working on my career (eventually I'll have a PhD in physics and do computational physics of some kind).
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Actually this is just a game to set the right expectations. They designed whole thing with a much larger project life right from the beginning.
This is utterly untrue. I have been working on the project since 2000 and allow me to explain where the 90 days figure came from.
It's rather complicated, however it boils down to how many solar panels they could bring, and how fast reduces the effectiveness of the panels. They tried everything they could think of in the lab to figure out some way to remove the dust from the panels however that proved to be something they could not solve, so they took data from the mars pathfinder mission, and came up with a number describing the conservative estimate for the lifetime of the solar panels given the dust on Mars (and remember, Mars has a lot of dust).
I've talked to mission physicist Geoffry Landis about this extensively and I have seen the data, which basically indicates that the rate of power dropping is about half of what we expected. This is very good news! This means we have a good shot at a very long extended mission, because if it continues at this rate, eventually the solar days on mars will increase in length faster than the dust buildup occludes power collection. It is believed therefore that the solar panels will not, as expected, be the final limiting factor on the length of the mission.
However, because that number was basically 90 days, every other instrument on the craft was designed to last at least 90 days, but not necessarily any longer. There are many motors that have a very short lifespan, which could now very easily fail at any time now. This includes a Rock Abrasion Tool motor, along with the azithmuthal actuator for the Pancam Mast Assembly. Also the wheel motors are put under a lot of stress and so they are good candidates for failure. Also, a single thermal failure in the middle of the night can destroy the Mini-Thermal Emission spectrometer, and the other spectrometers are not very useful if the Instrument Deployment Device fails either.
NASA played the same "stay on the safe side" tune on many otehr missions - see for example the Voyager missions, etc.
It is true that NASA made conservative estimates for things, which is proper engineering practice in situations that are as unknown and dangerous as this. I do not believe NASA was covering their own butts so much as trying to figure out how to use the 90 days they thought there were mostly guaranteed as best as they could, and then deal with more as they came.
Disclaimer: I am "just an intern" but I've been on this project for almost 4 years and what's stated above came from actual mission scientists and engineers and is not just speculation.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
My whole kid's class is using Maestro to view the Mars photos in a similiar fashion to the NASA engineers.
:)
Wow, really glad to hear that! I'm one of the Maestro developers and I am very proud to see it being used in educational settings. Don't forget that you can also build mockup activity plans in the very same way that the scientists do! It's more than just an image browser
Great science... and great learning as well. It's java driven... and crunches older computers. However, it really shows the excellent work that we are doing there.
Sorry about the speed, the main problem is that in order to handle certain real-time image processing (band arithmetic, mosaic warping, image rescaling, anaglyphs) etc, we had to use an architecture that burns significant RAM. The data sets are huge and you wouldn't believe what's going on behind the scenes. Also I believe that on the network at JPL most operations are IO bound so making the code faster would not speed the application for the scientists.
Much of this is because we weren't able to spend much time on the public version of our tool due to funding reasons. If you like this kind of software and want to see more of it, write to NASA and ask that they fund it. It's part of NASA's mission, to inspire the next generation to explore and to take part in science and engineering.
If you email maestro@telascience.org today I'll get you more info on how to do this.
Glad to see you're enjoying the software, and I hope your kid's class now has a better understanding of what it's like to explore mars.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Maestro/Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Are the makers of porn dialers, trojans, email relays and viruses going to put a helpful icon on their software? No.
I don't think this legislation is going after criminals, per se, but software like Gator and the like that are "legitimate" businesses with sleasy tactics. By making such underhanded tactics illegal, it will severely limit how much money etc can be collected by such a scheme. That is contrary to the nature of the software, which is to hide, report on your actions, enable remote operations, reproduce and the like.
Yes, and any corporation that wants to stay in business will comply with this law, reducing the effectiveness of such programs, and discouraging it.
Spammers are going to ignore this, just like an unsubscribe link.
Eh, spammers aren't the worst problem with this kind of software. Gator etc. are, as their software looks genuinely useful to the average user.
Cheers,
Justin
As an interning developer working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, I believe that Sun developing a linux-based strategy will be a great thing.
We use many Sun boxen, along with various flavors of Linux, and it would be tremendous to see more integration. Their work on linux-based Java has already been an enabling factor in our work and I believe that Sun has many good ideas (and good engineers working hard on it).
This annoucement gives me hope that we can continue in our relationship with Sun for future missions, while taking advantage of many of the best features of Linux.
To be fair I should mention we also use Windows and OS X to great effect as well, however good news for Sun is good news for us, especially considering the tremendous quantities of legacy software we have for Solaris!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Wow, that's one of the best slashdot posts I've ever read! I'm tired of religion bashing on /. (I mean, obviously it's their right to do so, it's the moderators I'm more upset with). Atheistic humanism is as much of a religion as anything else, and to be honest I think the most logical (although boring) choice is to be agnostic.
I'm a Christian and I study physics, and people so often ask me how I can be a Christian and believe so much in Science... I think for some people science has become the new religion - it gives us all the answers, except to the most important questions (why are we here? what is right/wrong?). I work on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission and I was upset to see so many posts on slashdot saying that finding life on another planet would mean the end of religion... I don't get this! Many people working on the mission are Christians (or also some other faiths) and they are all very excited by the prospect, as am I! People assume too much about things they do not understand.
Thanks again for a great post!
Cheers,
Justin
Stars are so small and so far apart that they almost never come close to hitting. Main sequence stars are roughly separated by one parsec (3.26 light-years). You can think of it like having one golf ball ten miles away from you and hitting another and asking if they are likely to collide. Galaxies do collide often and interact because they are close together compared to their width.
Very true! Two things though:
Plotting ahead is useful because even though stars don't collide, they do come close enough to each other to disrupt planetary systems. Even just preturbing the Oort cloud a bit would cause destructive impacts on earth that could wipe out all life.
Second of all, galaxies "collide" however it's kinda like two clouds of smoke "colliding" because there's really not much actual physical contact (although black holes might eat quite a bit during this period).
Good to point this out though! Galactic dynamics is quite fascinating, and much more complex than you'd expect!
Cheers,
Justin
7200 Watts! Holy hairdryers batman! With power consumptions like this, your athelon wouldn't be the only thing that's ON FIRE in your laptop! You assume that all of the power used to charge the battery is dissipated as heat. If that were the case, rechargable batteries would be useless since that would mean the battery didn't store any of the energy you put into it. I think I agree that your qualitative conclusion, though; a 90% efficient rechargable battery would dissipate 720 watts of heat, which is still quite a bit of thermal energy.
Just for the record, I was going for a +5 funny. Not sure I'll make it though.
I never actually made reference to how much of the heat would be dissapated, however even 5% would be a rediculous amount of heat. If I'd have had the actual numbers I could have done thorough analysis... stupid reporters!
Cheers,
Justin
Why is it that I'm not holding my breath to have this technology in a laptop?
Hmm... Lets look at the numbers here... I'll use the numbers for my trusty 17" powerbook.
The power supply for charging the battery puts out about 60 Watts of power. The article mentions that instead of taking an hour to charge, these batteries only take half a minute. That's 120 times the power, which means the total power used by a charger for my laptop using these batteries would be...
7200 Watts! Holy hairdryers batman! With power consumptions like this, your athelon wouldn't be the only thing that's ON FIRE in your laptop!
And remember where we like to keep our laptops!
Cheers,
Justin
Uh, that's not true at all.
blockquoth the article:
Did you even read it?
State of the system is essentially kept by the chaotic strange attractors, and state change is accomplish through a conrolled divergence. Check out some books on chaos theory, or some tutorials on sites like this.
Cheers,
Justin
Bold is me, italics is parent.
LATOR is capable of testing string theory, an exciting but so far merely theoretical development in high energy physics.
Or rather, it might conceivably be capable of testing some rather speculative models within string theory; there are plenty of other string theory models that LATOR can't test, and no good reason to believe in one over the other. That's one of the problems with string theory: it's too flexible. People can cook up all sorts of artificial string models, but that doesn't mean that any of those models are likely to be true, even if string theory itself is true.
It will test some of the most reasonable/popular models, which is a big step up from having never been tested at all.
LATOR also seems to be much more accurate,
It is, but it's also a test of something that we've already measured extensively (albeit much more sensitively). Our existing measurements of frame-dragging are extremely crude.
Quoting this page:
As you can see, you were mistaken.
and less likely to receive interference.
Why? And, so what? (Unless you're suggesting that GPB will receive so much interference that it won't work.) All it takes is a little bit of interference and the whole thing doesn't work at all, it's so darn sensitive. LATOR is less mechnically intensive.
I do hope that this experiment works out, however as other posters have mentioned, there only has to be one unexpected source of error to totally screw this up.
The same is true of LATOR or of any other experiment, especially highly sensitive ones.
LATOR's architecture is much different, and I believe by using a long baseline etc, it makes it difficult for interference at one end to screw up the entire experiment. Also remember that it's something that's fairly time invarient, whereas precession is not. The architecture of LATOR seems more likely to deal with sources of interference than something that's based primarily on mechnical components.
But I haven't done the actual math for either, so what do I know?
Cheers,
Justin
Very cool experiment (well worth the cash) however I think the LATOR relativity experiment would be much more interesting and scientifically useful.
And probably not much more expensive.
LATOR is capable of testing string theory, an exciting but so far merely theoretical development in high energy physics. LATOR also seems to be much more accurate, and less likely to receive interference.
I do hope that this experiment works out, however as other posters have mentioned, there only has to be one unexpected source of error to totally screw this up.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Someone call up Lance Bass - this would be a great time to send him up there!
Then again, one of the russians might have brought some duct tape...
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Actually, the Powermac G5s all come with SATA drives. It's not even an option, it's the base config. I'd be surprised if Dell didn't offer it too (can't be bothered to check their online store, hate the site).
I stand corrected!
Thanks,
Justin
>>Isn't it about time we ditched floppy disks for something better?
>CD-RW
Yeah, no one uses floppies for small files. Or bigger ones. Many people I know, including my family, don't have CD-RW or even CD-R.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched IDE drives for something better?
>SATA
And where is this option on dell.com/apple.com etc? Can you buy this at walmart? That stuff is nice for high end servers but...
>>Isn't it about time we ditched x86 for something better?
>AMD
So we went from x86 to... x86. Wow. And not to mention that AMD's doing everything they can to drag out x86 to 64 bits.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched Microsoft Windows for something better?
>Linux
Right, with it's 10% market share or whatever on desktops, I wouldn't exactly call it "ditching."
>>Isn't it about time we ditched CDs for something better?
>DVDs
No one listens to music on DVDs, and I'd like to ask you how much of your software comes on a single DVD instead of multiple CDs.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched telnet for something better?
>SSH
This is about the only accurate thing in your entire post.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched CRTs for something better?
>LCDs
Better??? The only thing better is their size and energy consumption. image quality is significantly worse, to the point that for hardcore photographic work they are simply unacceptable due to inability to be calibrated properly. They aren't as bright, and have a really annoying image persistence which is bad for gaming, movies etc. Not to mention how expensive they are, and how easily they break.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched 20-year-old TV sets for something better?
>New TVs, available at your local stores.
Unless your area is fully up to spec, getting an HDTV doesn't do a lot of good. And the other TVs are the same old crap we've had for 20 years, but with different shaped remotes.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched COBOL for something better?
>Visual Basic.
Eh... Visual Basic is similar I suppose but I'm not sure it's really aimed at the exact same niche.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched BASIC for something better?
>Uhm... it's for beginners. We can't ditch the biginners...
Yes but introducing more graphical or process oriented programming, maybe even programming without side effects might be better tahn just giving them a language with all they syntax benefits of FORTRAN and not even half as powerful as ancient hypercard!
Come to think of it, hypertalk is a much better beginner's language.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched SCO Unix for something better?
>Linux... we think.
I don't know what the original poster had in mind about this. No comment.
>>Isn't it about time we ditched DOS for something better?
>Windows XP
And what exactly is the market share of XP among windows users? There's still people using 98 out there!
>>Isn't it about time we ditched Dubya for something better?
>John Kerry
Not only is the election over a half year off, but it remains to be seen that he could even do a better job. I mean, Dubya may not be the brightest guy (or even trustworthy) however he's at least predictable, whereas John Kerry has basiccally voted on both sides of every issue... does that guy stand for anything???
Cheers,
Justin Wick
I personally think Venus is a much more interesting planet than mars. It would be cool for mars to attempt a venus rover despite the obvious challenges.
Mars has so far demonstrated an excellent proficiency for destroying planetary space probes, however historically it has not been known to build them.
Perhaps when it finds out Venus is a chick?
Cheers,
Justin
Well i had a discussion with Dr. David Lee, a nobel laurate at Cornell University, and he's pretty much convinced that String Theory will be born out.
:-D
So that's my vote
Although it'd be a little weird having to deal with all those extra dimensions all the time.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
P.S. As a JPLer, it's great to see JPL doing something hard-science related.
Undergraduates in U.S. universities are starting to abandon their studies in computer technology and engineering... Enrollment in those fields has dropped by 19% in the past year alone.
Woohoo! Less competition for me!
So long suckers!
The ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) is very concerned about the disruption of various portions of the RF spectrum, particularly HF that police, er, fema, etc. use.
I think you are confused. The ARRL is worried about sending modulated RF signals carrying broadband, not about fault tolerant power systems!
Maybe you are thinking of this article.
Cheers,
Justin
At first I thought the title read Rexx is Still Wrong After 25 Years.
I was like, "Damn straight!"
Cheers,
Justin
Check out http://www.worley.com/fprime.html
My part-time employer (when I'm not working for NASA/JPL) Maas Digital just bought a copy of the software... it utilizes stochastic methods to allow flexible real-time raytrace rendering (with good motion blur!)
It turns out that motion blur in 3D graphics is a very hard problem because it's essentially a high-dimensional integral, and it turns out the best method of doing generalized high-dimensional numerical integration is a stochastic algorithm (monte carlo method) so it's not surprising to me that it's a great way to do motion blurs.
My favorite aspect of stochastic methods is their ability to be continuously refined (for instance, in a video game, the longer you spent looking at an object, the better it would get etc, and the graphics performance would degrade very smoothly with changes in system load etc). It is also ideal for parallel processing, as it can be dynamically parallelized to completely heterogeneous computing nodes.
Dan and I agree that there's going to be a lot of stochastic algorithms in the future of computer graphics (though he is hopeful that analytical methods will eventually make a comeback, as they have better asymptotic performance).
Cheers,
Justin Wick
200 Million dollars is a lot of money to put towards something that can probably never be used with any other piece of equipment except Hubble, and not put it to use.
This is actually a logical falacy. I learned about this in a decision theory class I was in for a while at Cornell University. Previous investments should not directly affect economic decisions like this, only the current situation. That is, just because we spent lots of $$$ to make Plan A work does not mean we should continue with Plan A even if Plan B does the same thing for less additional money.
Imagine that you buy a truck for $10000. You then end up putting several more thousand dollars into it for repairs (like we did with the hubble). You even got a nice big turbocharger to put on it for when it's fixed next... however you get a bill saying it'll cost $4000 to fix the truck. And it's getting old. And lets say truck technology has advanced so much that for $4000 you can get a nice brand new truck that's even better. Rational decision-making dictates you would purchase the new truck - despite how much money you put into it in the past.
I'm not suggesting that we currently have an alternative to Hubble that does the same thing for a better price, however previous investments SHOULD NOT dictate our policies, only the current scientific/economic facts.
Disclaimer: I work for NASA/JPL, but as a software engineer.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
IIRC Osaki said there were some data structures he did not know how to implement in a pure functional language, but I don't think he said which. Are there any obvious gaps in the TOC given by the parent?
Splay Trees weren't mentioned in the TOC but I haven't gotten thruogh the whole book yet...
He does say that persistent arrays were about impossible to implement functionally except with a horrible access time. Random Access Lists are used instead (forgot to include that in my list).
Not sure what else is missing... I didn't see skiplists anywhere in there or any other randomized data structures, but that might have been a matter of personal taste on his part. He also didn't talk much about perfectly-balanced search trees (expensive in imperitive langauges, rediculously so in functional languages).
Good question though!
Cheers,
Justin Wick